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ROBERT ELSMERE 


BY 

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 

* I 


NEW YORK 

HURST & COMPANY, Publis ees 
122 Nassau Street 



.zJ 

1 



AUj^. 16 1934 






DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY 

OF 

MY TWO FRIENDS. 

Separated, in my thought of them, by much diversity of circumstan''e and opinion 
linked, in my faith about them, to each other, and to all the 
shining ones of the past, by the love of God and the 
service of man: 

THOMAS HILL GREEN 


(Late Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford), 
DIED 2Gth march, 1882; 

AND 

LAURA OCTAVIA MARA^ LA^TTELTON, 

DIED EASTER EVE, 1886. 




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ROBERT ELSMERE. 


WE&TMORELAND. 


CHAPTER I. 

It was a brilliant afternoon toward the end of May. The 
spring had been unusually cold and late, and it was evident 
from the general aspect of the lonely Westmoreland valley of 
Long Whindale that warmth and sunshine had only pene¬ 
trated to its bare green recesses, where the few scattered 
trees were fast rushing into their full summer dress, while at 
their feet, and along the bank of the stream, the flowers of 
March and April still lingered, as though they found it im¬ 
possible to believe that their rough brother, the east wind, 
had at last deserted them. The narrow road, which was the 
only link between the farm-houses sheltered by the crags at 
the head of the valley and those far-away regions of town 
and civilization suggested by the smoke-wreaths of Whin- 
borough on the southern horizon, was lined with masses 
of the white heck-berry or bird-cherry, and ran, an arrowy 
line of white, through the greenness of the sloping pastures. 
The sides of some of the little becks running down into the 
main river and many of the plantations round the farm were 
gay with the same tree, so that the farm-houses, gray-roofed 
and gray-walled, standing in the hollows of the fells, seemed 
here and there to have been robbed of all their natural aus¬ 
terity of aspect, and to be masquerading in a dainty garb of 
white and green imposed upon them by the caprice of the 
spring. 

During the greatei; part of its course the valley of Long 
Whindale is tame and featureless. The hills at the lower 
part are low and rounded, and the sheep and cattle pasture 
over slopes unbroken either by wood or rock. The fields are 
bare and close-shaven by the flocks which feed on them ; the 
walls run either perpendicularly in many places up the fells or 




4 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


horizontally along them, so that, save for the wooded course 
of the tumbling river and the bush-grown hedges of the road, 
the whole valley looks like a green map divided by regular 
lines of grayish black. But as the walker penetrates further, 
beyond a certain bend which the stream makes half-way from 
the head of the dale, the hills grow steeper, the breadth be¬ 
tween them contracts, the inclosure lines are broken and de¬ 
flected by the rocks and patches qf jflantation, and the few 
farms stand more boldly and conspicuously forward, each on 
its spur of land, looking up to or away from the great masses 
of frowning crag which close in the head of the valley, and 
which from the moment they come into sight give it dignity 
and a wild beauty. 

On one of these solitary houses, the afternoon sun, about 
to descend before very long behind the hills dividing Long 
Whindale from Shanmoor, was still lingering on this May 
afternoon we are describing, bringing out the whitewashed 
porch and the broad bands of white edging the windows into 
relief against the gray stone of the main fabi’ic, the gray 
roof overhanging it, and the group of sycamores and Scotch 
firs which protected it from the cold east and north. The 
western light struck full on a copper beech, which made a 
welcome patch of warm color in front of a long, gray line of 
outhouses standing level with the house, and touched the heck- 
berry blossom which marked the upward course of the little 
lane connecting the old farm with the road ; above it rose the 
green fell, broken here and there by jutting crags, and below 
it the ground sank rapidly through a piece of young hazel 
plantation, at this present moment a sheet of blue-bells, 
toward the level of the river. There was a dainty and j^et 
sober brightness about the whole picture. Summer in the 
North is for Nature a time of expansion and of joy as it is 
elsewhere, but there is none of that opulence, that sudden 
splendor and superabundance, which mark it in the South. 
In these bare green valleys there is a sort of delicate austerity 
even in the summer ; the memory of winter seems to be still 
lingering about these wind-swept fells, about the farm-houses, 
with their rough serviceable walls, of the same stone as the 
crags behind them, and the ravines, in which the shrunken 
becks trickle musicall}^ down through tJie debris of innumer¬ 
able Decembers. The country is blithe, but soberly blithe. 
Nature shows herself delightful to man, but there is nothing 
absorbing or intoxicating about her. Man is still well able 
to defend himself against her, to live his own independent 
life of labor and of will, and to develop the tenacity of hidden 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


5 


feeling, that slowly growing intensity of purpose, which is so 
often wiled out of him by the spells of the South. 

The distant aspect of Burwood Farm differed in nothing 
from that of the few other farm-houses which dotted the fells 
or clustered beside the river between it and the rocky end of 
the valley. But as one came nearer, certain signs of difference 
became visible. The garden, instead of being the old-fashioned 
medley of phloxes, lavender bushes, monthly roses, goosebeny- 
trees, herbs, and pampas-grass, with which the farmers’ wives 
of Long Whindale loved to fill their front inplosures, was 
trimly laid down in turf dotted with neat fiower-beds, full at 
the moment we are writing of with orderly patches of scarlet 
and purple anemones, wall-flowers, and pansies. At the side 
of the house a new bow-window, modest enough in dimen¬ 
sions and make, had been thrown out on to another close- 
shaven piece of lawn, and by its suggestion of a distant 
sophisticated order of things disturbed tlie homely impression 
left by the untouched ivy-grown walls, the unpretending 
porch, and wdde slate window-sills of tlie front. And evi¬ 
dently the line of sheds standing level with the dwelling- 
house no longer sheltered the animals, the carts, or the tools 
which make the small capital of a Westmoreland farmer. 
The windows in them were new, the doors fresh painted and 
closely shut ; curtains of some soft outlandish make showed 
themselves in what had once been a stable, and the turf 
stretched smoothly up to a narrow' graveled path in front of 
them, unbroken by a single footmark. No, evidently the old 
farm, for such it undoubtedly w'as, had been but lately, or 
comparatively lately, transformed to new and softer uses ; 
that rough patriarchal life of which it had once been a symbol 
and center no longer bustled and clattered through it. It had 
become the shelter of new ideas, the home of another and a 
milder race than once possessed it. 

In a stranger coming upon the house for the first time, on 
this particular evening, the sense of a changing social order 
and a vanishing past produced by the sliglit but significant 
modifications it had undergone, w^ould have been greatly 
quickened by certain sounds wdiich were streaming out on to 
the evening air from one of the divisions of that long one¬ 
storied addition to the main dw'elling we have already des¬ 
cribed. Some indefatigable musician inside w^as practicing 
the violin with surprising energy and vigor, and within the 
little garden the distant murmur of the river and tlie gentle 
breathing of the w^est wind round the fell w^ere entirely con¬ 
quered and banished by these triumphant shakes and turns, 


G 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


or by the flourishes and the broad cantahile passages of one of 
Spohr’s Andantes. For a while, as the sun sunk lower and 
lower toward the Shanmoor hills, the hidden artist had it all 
his, or her, own way ; the valley and its green spaces seemed 
to be possessed by this stream of eddying sound, and no other 
sign-of life broke the gray quiet of the house. But at last, 
just as the golden ball touched the summit of the craggy fell 
which makes the western boundary of the dale at its highest 
end, the house door opened, and a young girl, shawled and 
holding sonKi soft burden in her arms, appeared on the thres¬ 
hold, and stood there for a moment, as though trying the 
quality of the air outside. Her pause of inspection seemed to 
satisfy her, for she moved forward, leaving the door open be¬ 
hind her, and, stepping across the lawn, settled herself in a 
wicker-chair under an apple-tree, which had only just shed its 
blossoms on the turf below. She had hardly done so when 
one of the distant doors opening on the gravel path flew open, 
and another maiden, a slim creature garbed in aesthetic blue, 
a mass of reddish brown hair flying back from her face, also 
stepped out into the garden. 

“ Agnes ! ” cried the new-comer, who had the strenuous and 
disheveled air natural to one just emerged from a long violin 
practice. “ Has Catherine come back yet ? ” 

“ Not that I know of. Do come here and look at pussy ; 
did you ever see anything so comfortable ? ” 

‘‘ You and she look about equally lazy. What have you 
been doing all the afternoon ? ’’ 

‘‘ We look what we are, my dear. Doing ? Why, I have 
been attending to my domestic duties, arranging the flowers, 
mending my pink dress for to-morrow night, and helping to 
keep mamma in good spirits ; she is depressed because she has 
been finding Elizabeth out in some waste or other, and I have 
been preaching to her to make Elizabeth uncomfortable if 
she likes, but not to worrit herself. And after all, pussy and 
I have come out for a rest. We’ve earned it, haven’t we, 
Chattie ? And, as for you. Miss Artistic, I should like to 
know what you’ve been doing for the good of your kind since 
dinner. I suppose you had tea at the vicarage ? ” 

The speaker lifted inquiring eyes to her sister as she spoke, 
her cheek plunged in the warm fur of a splendid Persian cat, 
her whole look and voice expressing the very highest degree 
of quiet, comfort and self-possession. Agnes Leyburii was 
not pretty ; the lower part of the face was a little heavy in 
outline and molding ; the teeth were not as they should have 
been, and the nose was unsatisfactory. But the eyes under 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


7 


their long lashes were shrewdness itself, and there was an in¬ 
dividuality in the voice, a cheery even-temperedness in look 
and tone which had a pleasing effect on the by-stander. Her 
dress was neat and dainty ; every detail of it bespoke a young 
woman who respected both herself and the fashion. 

Her sister, on the other hand, was guiltless of the smallest 
trace of fashion. Her skirts were cut with the most engaging 
naivete, she was much adorned with amber beads, and her 
red-brown hair had been tortured and frizzled to look as much 
like an aureole as possible. But, on the other hand, she was a 
beauty, though at present you felt her a beauty in disguise, a 
stage Cinderella as it were, in very becoming rags, waiting for 
the godmother. 

“ Yes, I had tea at the vicarage,” said this young person, 
throwing herself on the grass in spite of a murmured protest 
from Agnes, who had an inherent dislike of anything physi¬ 
cally rash, “ and I had the greatest difficulty to get away. 
Mrs. Thornburgh is in such a flutter about this visit! One 
would think it was the bishop and all his canons, and promo¬ 
tion depending on it, she has baked so many cakes and put 
out so many dinner napkins ! I don’t envy the young man. 
She will have no wits left at all to entertain him with. I 
actually wound up by administering some sal-volatile to her.” 

“Well, and after the sal-volatile did you get anything 
coherent out of her on the subject of the young man ? ” 

“ By degrees,” said the girl, her eyes twinkling ; “ if one 
can only remember the thread between whiles one gets at 
the fact somehow. In between the death of Mr. Elsmere’s 
father and his going to college, we had, let me see—the spare- 
room curtains, the making of them and the cleaning of them, 
Sarah’s idiocy in sticking to her black sheep of a young man, 
the price of tea when she married, Mr. Thornburgh’s singular 
preference of boiled mutton to roast, the poems he had written 
to her when she was eighteen, and I can’t tell you what else 
besides. But I held fast, and every now and then I brought 
her up to the point again, gently, but firmly, and now I think 
I know all I want to know about the interesting stranger.” 

“ My ideas about him are not many,” said Agnes, rubbing 
her cheek up and down the purring cat, “and there doesn’t 
seem to be much order in them. He is very accomplished—a 
teetotaller—he has been to the Holy Land, and his hair has 
been cut close after a fever. It sounds odd, but I am not curi¬ 
ous. I can very well wait till to-morrow evening.” 

“ Oh, well, as to ideas about a person, one doesn’t get that 
sort of thino: from Mrs. Thornburgh. But I know how old he 

o o 


8 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


( 


is, where he went to college, where his mother lives, a certain 
number of his mother’s peculiarities, which seem to be Irish 
and curious, where his living is, how much it is worth, likewise 
the color of his eyes, as near as Mrs. Thornburgh can get.” 

‘‘ What a start you have been getting ! ” said Agnes lazily. 
“ But what is it that makes the poor old thing so excited ? ” 

Rose sat up and began to fling the fir-cones lying about her 
at a distant mark with an energy worthy of her physical per¬ 
fections and the aesthetic freedom of her attire. 

“ Because, my dear, Mrs. Thornburgh at the present moment 
is always seeing herself as the conspirator sitting match in hand 
before a mine. Mr. Elsmere is the match—we are the mine ! ” 

Agnes looked at her sister, and they both laughed, the bright 
rippling laugh of young women perfectly aware of their own 
value, and in no hurry to force an estimate of it on the male 
world. 

“Well,” said Rose deliberately, her delicate cheek flushed 
with her gymnastics, her eyes sparkling, “ there is no saying. 
‘ Propinquity does it’—as Mrs. Thornburgh is always remind¬ 
ing us. But where can Catherine be ? She went out directly 
after lunch.” 

“ She has gone out to see that youth who hurt his back at 
the Tysons—at least I heard her talking to mamma about him, 
and she went out with a basket that looked like beef tea.” 

Rose frowned a little. 

“ And I suppose I ought to have been to the school or to see 
Mrs. Robson, instead of fiddling all the afternoon. I dare say 
I ought—only, unfortunately, I like my fiddle, and I don’t 
like stuffy cottages ; and as for the goody books, I read them 
so badly that the old women themselves come down upon me.” 

“ I seem to have been making the best of both worlds,” said 
Agnes placidly. “ I haven’t been doing anything I don’t like, 
but I got hold of that dress she brought home to make for 
little Emma Payne, and nearly finished the skirt, so that I 
feel as good as when one has been twice to church on a wet 
Sunday. Ah, there is Catherine. I heard the gate.” 

As she spoke steps were heard approaching through the 
clump of ti-ees which sheltered the little entrance-gate, and as 
Rose sprang to her feet a tall figure in white and gray ap¬ 
peared against the background of the sycamores, and came 
quickly toward the sisters. 

“ Dears, I am so sorry ; I am afraid you have been waiting 
for me. But poor Mrs. Tyson wanted me so badly that I 
could not leave her. She had no one else to help her or to be 
with her till that eldest girl of hers came home from work.” 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


9 


It doesn’t matter,” said Rose, as Catherine put her arm 
round her shoulder ; “ mamma hasn’t been fidgeting, and as 
for Agnes, she looks as if she never wanted to move again.” 

Catherine’s clear eyes, which at the moment seemed to be 
full of inward light, kindled in them by some foregoing ex¬ 
perience, rested kindly, but only half consciously, on her 
younger sister, as Agnes softly nodded and smiled to her. 
Evidently she was a good deal older than the other two—she 
looked about six-and-twenty, a young and vigorous woman in 
the prime of health and strength. The lines of the form were 
rather thin and spare, but they were softened by the loose 
bodice and long, full skirt of her dress, and by the folds of a 
large white muslin handkerchief which was crossed over her 
breast. The lace, sheltered by the plain shade-hat, was also 
a little spoiled from the point of view of beauty by the sharp¬ 
ness of the lines about the chin and mouth, and by a slight 
prominence of the cheek-bones, but the eyes, of a dark bluish 
gray, were fine, the nose delicately cut, the brow smooth and 
beautiful, while the complexion had caught the freshness 
and purity of Westmoreland air and Westmoreland streams. 
About face and figure there was a delicate, austere charm, 
something which harmonized with the bare stretches and 
lonely crags of the fells, something which seemed to make her 
a true daughter of the mountains, partaker at once of their 
gentleness and their severity. She was in her place here, 
beside the homely Westmoreland house and under the shelter 
of the fells. When you first saw the other sisters you 
wondered what strange chance had brought them into that 
remote, sparsely peopled valley; they were plainly exiles, and 
conscious exiles, from the movement and exhilarations of a 
fuller social life. But Catherine impressed you as only a 
refined variety of the local type ; you could havfe found many 
like her, in a sense, among the sweet-faced, serious women of 
the neighboring farms. 

Now, as she and Rose stood together, her hand still resting 
lightly on the other’s shoulder, a question from Agnes banished 
the faint smile on her lips, and left only the look of inward 
illumination, the expression of one who had just passed, as it 
were, through a strenuous and heroic moment of life, and was 
still living in the exaltation of memory. 

“ So the poor fellow is worse ? ” 

“ Yes. Doctor Baker, whom they have got to-dajq says 
the spine is hopelessly injured. He may live oh paralyzed for 
a few months or longer, but there is no hope of cure.” 

Both girls uttered a shocked exclamation : “ That fine, 


10 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


strong young man ! ” said Rose, under her breath. ‘‘ Does he 
know ? ” 

“ Yes ; when I got there the doctor had just gone, and Mrs. 
Tyson, who was quite unprepared for anything so dreadful, 
seemed to have almost lost her wits, poor thing ! I found her 
in the front kitchen with her apron over her head, rocking to 
and fro, and poor Arthur in the inner room—all alone—wait¬ 
ing in suspense.” 

“ And who told him ? He has been so hopeful.” 

“ I did,” said Catherine gently ; ‘‘ they made me. He 
would know, and she couldn’t—she ran out of the room. I 
never saw anything so pitiful.” 

“ Oh, Catherine ? ” exclaimed Rose’s moved voice, while 
Agnes got up, and Chattie jumped softly down from her lap, 
unheeded. 

“ How did he bear it ? ” 

“ Don’t ask me,” said Catherine, while the quiet tears filled 
her eyes and her voice broke, as the hidden feeling would 
have its way. ‘‘ It was terrible ! I don’t know how we got 
through that half-hour—his mother and I. It was like wrestl¬ 
ing with some one in agony. At last he was exhausted—he 
let me say the Lord’s Prayer ; I think it soothed him, but one 
couldn’t tell. He seemed half asleep when I left. Oh ! ” she 
cried, laying her hand in a close grasp on Rose’s arm, “ if you 
had seen his eyes, and his poor hands—there was such de¬ 
spair in them ! They say, though he was so young, he was 
thinking of getting married ; and he was so steady, such a 
good son ! ” 

A silence fell upon the three. Catherine stood looking out 
across the valley toward the sunset. Now that the demand 
upon her for calmness and,fortitude was removed, and that the 
religious exaltation in which she had gone through the last 
three hours was becoming less intense, the pure human pity of 
the scene she had just witnessed seemed to be gaining upon 
her. Her lip trembled, and two or three tears silently over¬ 
flowed. Rose turned and gently kissed her cheek, and Agnes 
touched her hand caressingly. She smiled at them, for it was 
not in her nature to let any sign of love pass unheeded, and in 
a few more seconds she had mastered herself. 

“ Dears, we must go in. Is mother in her room ? Oh, Rose ! 
in that thin dress on the grass ; I oughtn’t to have kept you 
out. It is quite cold by now.” 

And she hurried them in, leaving them to superintend the 
preparations for supper downstairs while she ran up to her 
mother. ^ 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


11 


A quarter of an hour afterward they were all gathered round 
the supper-table, the windows open to the garden and the May 
twilight. At Catherine’s right hand sat Mrs. Leyburn, a tall, 
delicate-looking woman, wrapped in a white shawl, about 
whom there were only three things to be noticed—an amiable 
temper, a sufficient amount of weak health to excuse her from 
all the more tiresome duties of life, and an incorrigible tendency 
to sing the praises of her daughters at all times and to all peo¬ 
ple. The daughters winced under it ; Catherine, because it 
was a positive pain to her to hear herself brought forward and 
talked about; the others, because youth infinitely prefers to 
make its own points in its own way. Nothing, however, could 
mend this defect of Mrs. Leyburn’s. Catherine’s strength of 
will could keep it in check sometimes, but in general it had to 
be borne with. A sharp word would have silenced the mother’s 
well-meant chatter at any time—for she was a fragile, nervous 
woman, entirely dependent on her surroundings—but none 
of them were capable of it, and their mere refractoriness 
counted for nothing. 

The dining-room in which they were gathered had a good 
deal of homely dignity, and was to the Leyburns full of asso¬ 
ciations. The oak settle near the fire, the oak sideboard run¬ 
ning along one side of the room, the black oak table with 
carved legs at which they sat, were genuine pieces of old 
Westmoreland work, which had belonged to their grandfather. 
The heavy carpet covering the stone floor of what twenty 
years before had been the kitchen of the farm-house was a 
survival from a south-country home, which had sheltered their 
lives for eight happy years. Over the mantel-piece hung the 
portrait of the girls’ father, a long, serious face, not unlike 
Wordsworth’s face in outline, and bearing a strong resem¬ 
blance to Catherine ; a line of silhouettes adorned the mantel¬ 
piece ; on the walls were prints of Winchester and Worcester 
cathedrals, photographs of Greece, and two old-fashioned en¬ 
gravings of Dante and Milton ; while a book-case, filled appar¬ 
ently with the father’s college books and college prizes and the 
favorite authors—mostly poets, philosophers, and theologians— 
of his later years, gave a final touch of habitableness to the 
room. The little meal and its appointments—the eggs, the 
home-made bread and pi’eserves, the tempting butter and old- 
fashioned silver gleaming among the flowers which Rose ar¬ 
ranged with fanciful skill in Japanese pots of her own provid¬ 
ing—suggested the same family qualities as the room. Fru¬ 
gality, a dainty personal self-respect, a family consciousness, 
tenacious of its memories and tenderly careful of all the little 


12 


ROBERT EL8MERE, 


material objects which were to it the symbols of those mem¬ 
ories—clearly all these elements entered into the Leyburn tra¬ 
dition. 

And of this tradition, with its implied assertions and de¬ 
nials, clearly Catherine Leyburn, the elder sister, was, of all 
the persons gathered in this little room, the most pronounced 
embodiment. She sat at the head of the table, the little 
basket of her own and her mother’s keys beside her. Her 
dress was a soft black brocade, with lace collar and cuffs, 
which had once belonged to an aunt of her mother’s. It was 
too old for her both in fashion and material, but it gave her a 
gentle, almost matronly, dignity which became her. Her long, 
thin hands, full- of character and delicacy, moved nimbly 
among the cups ; all her ways were quiet and yet decided. It 
was evident that among this little party she, and not the 
plaintive mother, was really in authority. To-night, however, 
her looks were especially soft. The scene she had gone 
through in the afternoon had left her pale, with traces of pa¬ 
tient fatigue round the eyes and mouth, but all her emotion 
was gone, and she was devoting herself to the others, respond¬ 
ing with quick interest and ready smiles to all they had to say, 
and contributing the little experiences of her own day in re¬ 
turn. 

Rose sat on her left hand in yet another gown of strange 
tint and archaic outline. Rose’s gowns were legion. They 
were manufactured by a farmer’s daughter across the valley, 
under her strict and precise supervision. She was accus¬ 
tomed, as she boldly avowed, to shut herself up at the begin- 
ing of each season of the year for two days meditation on the 
subject. And now, thanks to the spring warmth, she was enter¬ 
ing at last with infinite zest on the results of her April vigils. 

, Catherine had surveyed her as she entered the room, with a 
smile, but a smile not altogether to Rose’s taste. 

^ “ What, another, Roschen ? ” she had said, with the slightest 
lifting of the eyebrows. “ You never confided that to me. 
Did you think I was unworthy of anything so artistic.” 

“ Not at all,” said Rose calmly, seating herself. “ I 
thought you were better employed.” 

But a flush flew over her transparent cheek, and she pres¬ 
ently threw an irritated look at Agnes, who had been looking 
from her to Catherine Avith amused eyes. 

“ I met Mr. Thornburgh and Mr. Elsmere driving from the 
station,” Catherine announced presently ; “ at least there was 
a gentleman in a clerical wide-awake, with a portmanteau be¬ 
hind, so I imagined it must have been he.” 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


13 


“ Did he look promising ?” inquired Agnes. 

‘‘ I don’t think I noticed,” said Catherine simply, but witli 
a momentary change of expression. The sisters, remembering 
how she had come in upon them with that look of one ‘‘ lifted 
up,” understood why she had not noticed, and refrained from 
further questions. 

“ Well, it is to be hoped the young man is recovered enough 
to stand Long Whindale festivities,” said Rose. “ Mrs. Thorn¬ 
burgh means to let them loose on his devoted head to-morrow 
night. ” 

“ Who are coming ? ” asked Mrs. Leyburn, eagerly. The oc¬ 
casional tea-parties of the neighborhood were an unfailing ex¬ 
citement to her, simply because, by dint of the small adorn- 
ings natural to the occasion, they showed her daughters to 
her under slightly new aspects. To see Catherine, who never 
took any thought for her appearance, forced to submit to a 
white dress, a line of pearls round the shapely throat, a flower 
in the brown hair, put there by Rose’s imperious Angers ; to 
sit in a corner well out of draughts, watching the effect of 
Rose’s half-fledged beauty, and drinking in the compliments 
of the neighborhood on Rose’s playing or Agnes’s conversa¬ 
tion, or Catherine’s practical ability—these were Mrs. Leyburn’s 
passions, and a tea-party always gratified them to the full. 

‘‘Mamma asks as if really she wanted an answer,” re¬ 
marked Agnes dryly. “Dear mother, can’t you by now 
make up a tea-party at the Thornburghs out of your head ?” 

“ The Seatons ? ” inquired Mrs. Leyburn. 

“ 3frs. Seaton and Miss Barks,” replied Rose. “ The rector 
won’t come. And I needn’t say that, having moved heaven 
and earth to get Mrs. Seaton, Mrs. Thornburgh is now misera¬ 
ble because she has got her. Her ambition is gratified, but she 
knows that she has spoiled the party. Well, then, Mr. May- 
hew, of course, his son, and his flute.” 

“ You to play his accompaniments ? ” put in Agnes, slyl}^ 
Rose’s lip curled. 

“ Not if Miss Barks knows it,”.she said emphatically, “ nor 
if I know it. The Bakers of course, ourselves, and the un¬ 
known.” 

“Dr. Baker is always pleasant,” said Mrs. Leyburn, leaning 
back and dniwing her white shawl languidly round her. 
“He told me the other day, Catherine, that if it weren’t for 
you he should have to retire. He regards you as his junior 
partner. ‘Marvelous nursing gift your eldest daughter has, 
Mrs. Leyburn,’ he said to me the other day. A most agreea¬ 
ble man.” 


u 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


I wonder if I shall be able to get any candid opinions out 
of Mr. Elsmere the day after to-morrow ? ” said Rose, musing. 
“It is difficult to avoid having an opinion of some sort about 
Mrs. Seaton.” 

“ Oxford dons don’t gossip and are never candid,” remarked 
Agnes severely. 

“ Then Oxford dons must be very dull,” cried Rose. “ How¬ 
ever,” and her countenance brightened, “if he stays here four 
weeks we can teach him.” 

Catherine, meanwhile, sat watching the two girls with a 
soft, elder sister’s indulgence. Was it in connection with 
their bright, attractive looks that the thought flitted through 
her head : “ I wonder what the young man will be like ? ” 

“ Oh, by the way,” said Rose presently, “ I had nearly for¬ 
gotten Mrs. Thornburgh’s two messages. I informed her, 
Agnes, that you had given up water-color and meant to try 
oils, and she told me to implore you not to, because ‘ water 
color is so much more lady-like than oils.’ And as for you, 
Catherine, she sent you a most special message. I was tell 
you that she just loced the way you had taken to plaiting 
your hair lately—that it was exactly like the picture of 
Jeanie Deans she has in the drawing-room, and that she 
wonld never forgive you if you didn’t plait it so to-morrow 
night.” 

Catherine flushed faintly as she got up from the table. 

“ Mrs. Thornburgh has eagle-eyes,” she said, moving away 
to give her arm to her mother, who looked fondly at her, 
making some remark in praise of Mrs. Thornburgh’s taste. 

“ Rose,” cried Agnes indignantl}^, when the other two had 
disappeared, “ you and Mrs. Thornburgh have not the sense 
you were born with. What on earth did you say that to 
Catherine for ? ” 

Rose stared ; then her face fell a little. 

“ I suppose it was foolish,” she admitted. Then she leaned 
her head on one hand and drew meditative patterns on the 
table-cloth with the other.^ “You know, Agnes,” she said 
presently, looking up, “ there are drawbacks to having a Saint 
Elizabeth for a sister.” 

Agnes discreetly made no reply, and Rose was left alone. 
She sat dreaming a few minutes, the corners of flie red mouth 
drooping. Then she sprang up with a long sigh. “A little 
life ! ” she said, half aloud, “a little wickedness ! and she 
shook her curly head defiantly. 

A few minutes later, in the little drawing-room on the 
other side of the hall, Catherine and Rose stood together by 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


15 


the open window. For the first time in a lingering spring, 
the air was soft and balmy ; a tender grayness lay over the 
valley ; it was not night, though above the clear outlines of 
the fell the stars were just twinkling in the pale blue. Far 
away under the crag on the further side of High Fell a 
light was shining. As Catherine’s eyes caught it there was a 
quick response in the fine Madonna-like face. 

‘‘ Any news for me from the Backhouses this afternoon ? ” 
she asked Rose. 

“Ho, I heard of none. How is she?” 

“ Dying,” said Catherine simply, and stood a moment look¬ 
ing out. Rose did not interrupt her. She knew that the house 
from which the light was shining sheltered a tragedy ; she 
guessed with the vagueness of nineteen that it was a tragedy 
of passion and sin ; but Catherine had not been communi¬ 
cative on the subject, and Rose had for some time past set up 
a dumb resistance to her sister’s most characteristic ways of 
life and thought, which prevented her now from asking ques¬ 
tions. Slie wished nervously to give Catherine’s extraordinary 
moral strength no greater advantage over her than she could 
help. 

Presently, however, Catherine threw her arm around her 
with a tender protectiveness. 

“ What did you do with yourself all all the afternoon 
Roschen ? ” 

“ I practiced for two hours,” said the girl shortly, “ and two 
hours tills morning. My Spohr is nearly perfect.” 

“ And you didn’t look into the school ? ” asked Catherine, 
hesitating; “I know Miss Merry expected you.” 

“ Ho, I didn’t. When one can play the violin and can’t 
teach any more than a cockatoo, what’s the good of wasting 
one’s time in teaching ? ” 

Catherine did not reply. A minute after Mrs. LeyburU 
called her, and she went to sit on a stool at her mother’s feet, 
her hands resting on the elder woman’s lap, the whole attitude 
of the tall, active figure one of beautiful and child-like aban¬ 
donment. Mrs. Leyburn wanted to confide in her about a new 
cap, and Catherine took up the subject with a zest which kept 
her mother happy till bed-time. 

“ Why couldn’t she take as much interest in my Spohr ? ” 
thought Rose. 

Late that night, long after she had performed all a maid’s 
offices for her mother, Catherine Leyburn was busy in her own 
room arranging a large cupboard containing medicines and 
ordinary medical necessaries, a storehouse whence all the 


16 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


simpler emergencies of tlieir end of tlie valley were supplied. 
She had put on a white flannel dressing-gown and moved 
noiselessly about in it, the very embodiment of order, of purity, 
of quiet energy. The little white-curtained room was bare¬ 
ness and neatness itself. There were a few book-shelves along 
the walls, holding the books which her father had given her. 
Over the bed were two enlarged portraits of her parents, and 
a line of queer little faded monstrosities, re])resenting Rose 
and Agnes in different stages of childhood. On the table be¬ 
side the bed was a pile of well-worn books—Keble, Jeremy 
Ta 3 dor, the Bible—connected in the mind of the mistress of 
the room with the intensest moments of the spiritual life. 
There was a strip of carpet by the bed, a plain chair or two, a 
large press; otherwise no furniture that was not absolutely 
necessary, and no ornaments. And yet, for all its emptiness, 
the little room in its order and spotlessness had the look and 
spell of a sanctuary. 

When her task was finished Catherine came forward to the 
infinitesimal dressing-table, and stood a moment before tlie* 
common cottage looking-glass upon it. The candle behind 
her showed her the outlines of her head and face in shadow 
against the white ceiling. Her soft brown hair was plaited 
high above the broad white brow, giving to it an added state¬ 
liness, while it left unmasked the pure lines of the neck. Mrs. 
Thornburgh and her mother were quite right. Simple as 
the new arrangement was, it could hardly have been more ef¬ 
fective. 

But the looking-glass got no smile in return for its informa¬ 
tion. Catherine Leyburn Avas young ; she was alone ; she was 
being very plainl}’- told that, taken as a whole, she was, or 
might be at any moment, a beautiful woman. And all her 
answer was a frown and a quick movement away from the 
glass. Putting up her hands she began to undo the plaits with 
haste, almost Avith impatience ; she smoothed the whole mass 
then set free into the severest order, plaited it closely together, 
and then, putting out her light, threw herself on her knees be¬ 
side the Avindow, which Avas partly open to the starlight and 
the mountains. The A^oice of the river far aAvay, wafted from 
the mist-covered depths of the vallejq and the faint rustling of 
the trees just outside, were for long after the only sounds 
Avhich broke the silence. 

When Catherine appeared at breakfast next morning her 
hair Avas plainly gathered into a close knot behind, which had 
been her AA^aj^ of dressing it since she was thirteen. Agnes 
t'hrew a quick look at Rose ; Mrs. Leyburn, as soon as she 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


17 


had made out through her spectacles what was the matter, 
broke into warm expostulations. 

^ “ It is more comfortable, dear mother, and takes much less 
time,” said Catherine, reddening. 

“Poor Mrs. Thornburgh ! ” remarked Agnes dryly. 

“ Oh, Rose will make up ! ” said Catherine, glancing, not 
without a spark of mischief in her gray eyes, at Rose’s 
tortured locks ; “ and mamma’s new cap, which will be 
superb ! ” 

CHAPTER n. 

About four o’clock on the afternoon of the day which was 
to be marked in the annals of Long Whin dale as that of Mrs. 
Thornburgh’s “ high tea,” that lady was seated in the vicarage 
garden, her spectacles on her nose, a large couvre-pied over 
her knees, and the Whinborough newspaper on her lap. The 
neighborhood of this last enabled her to make an intermittent 
pretense of reading ; but in reality the energies of her house¬ 
wifely mind were taken up with quite other things. The 
vicar’s wife was plunged in a housekeeping experiment of 
absorbing interest. All her solid preparations for the evening 
w^re over, and in her own mind she decided that with them 
there was no possible fault to be found. The cook, Sarah, had 
gone about her work with a spirit at once lavish and fastidi¬ 
ous, breathed into her by her mistress. No better tongue, no 
2 )lumper chickens, than those which would grace her board 
to-night were to be found, so Mrs. Thornburgh was j^ersuaded, 
in the district. And so with everything else of a substantial 
kind. On this head the hostess felt no anxieties. 

But a “ tea ” iif the north country depends for distinction, 
not on its solids or its savories, but on its sweets. A rural 
hojstess earns her reputation, not by a discriminating eye for 
butcher’s meat, but by her inventiveness in cakes and custards. 
And it was just here, with regard to this “ bubble rej)utation,” 
that the vicar’s wife of Long Whindale was particularly sensi¬ 
tive. Was she not expecting Mrs. Seaton, the wife of the 
Rector of Whinborough—odious woman—to tea? Was it 
not incumbent on her to do well, nay, to do brilliantly, in the 
eyes of this local magnate ? And how was it possible to do 
brilliantly in this matter with a cook whose recipes were hope¬ 
lessly old-fashioned, and who had an exasperating belief in 
the sufficiency of buttered “ whigs” and home-made marma¬ 
lade for all requirements ? Stung by these thoughts, Mrs. 
Thornburgh had gone prowling about the neighboring town 
of Whinborough till the shop window of a certain newly ar- 


18 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


rived confectioner had been revealed to her, stored with the 
most airy and appetizing trifles—of a make and coloring quite 
metropolitan. She had flattened her gray curls against the 
windows for one deliberate moment ; had then rushed in ; 
and as soon as the carrier’s cart of Long Whindale, which she 
was now anxiously awaiting, should have arrived, bearing v ith 
it the produce of that adventure, Mrs. Tliornburgh would be 
a proud woman, prepared to meet the legion of rector’s wives 
without flinching. Not, indeed, in all respects a woman at 
peace with herself and the world. In the country, where 
every household should he self-contained, a certain discredit 
attaches in every well-regulated mind to “ getting things in.” 
Mrs. Thornburgh was also nervous at the thought of the bill. 
It would have to be met gradually out of the weekly money. 
For “ William ” was to know nothing of the matter, except 
so far as a few magnificent generalities and the testimony of 
his own dazzled eyes might inform him. But after all, in this 
as in everything else, one must suffer to be distinguished. 

The carrier, however, lingered. And at last the drowsiness 
of the afternoon overcame even those pleasing expectations 
we have described, and Mrs. Thornburgh’s newspaper dropped 
unheeded to her feet. The vicarage, under the shade .of 
which she was sitting, was a new gray-stone building with 
wooden gables, occupying the site of what had once been the 
earlier vicarage house of Long Whindale, the primitive dwell¬ 
ing-house of an incumbent whose chapelry, after sundry aug¬ 
mentations, amounted to just twenty-seven pounds a year. 
The modern house, though it only contained sufficient accom¬ 
modation for Mr. and Mrs. Thornburgh, one guest, and two 
maids, Avoiild have seemed palatial to those rii^tic clerics of the 
past from whose ministrations the lonely valley had drawn its 
spiritual sustenance in times gone by. They, indeed, had be¬ 
longed to another race—a race sprung from the soil and con¬ 
tent to spend the whole of life in very close contact and very 
homely intercourse with their mother earth. JMr. Tliornburgh, 
who had come to the valley only a few years before from a 
parish in one of the large manufacturing towns, and who had 
no inherited interest in the Cumbrian folk and their ways, had 
only a very faint idea, and that a distinctly deprecatory one, of 
what these mythical predecessors of his, with their strange so¬ 
cial status and unbecoming occupations, might be like. But 
there were one or two old men still lingering in the dale who 
could have told him a great deal about them, whose memory 
went back to the days when the relative social importance of 
the dale parsons was exactly expressed b^^ the characteristic 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


19 


Westmoreland saying : “ Ef ye’ll nobbut send ns a gude scliule- 
measter, a verra’ moderate parson ’nil dea ! ” and whose slow 
minds, therefore, were filled with a strong inarticulate sense 
of difference as they say him pass along the road, and recalled 
the incumbent of their childhood, dropping in for his “ crack ” 
and his glass of ‘‘ yale ” at this or that farm-house on any oc¬ 
casion of local festivity, or driving his sheep to Whinborough 
Market with his own hands like any other peasant of the dale. 

Within the last twenty years, however, the few remaining 
survivors of this primitive clerical order in the Westmoreland 
and Cumberland valleys have dropped into their quiet, unre¬ 
membered graves, and new men of other wa3'S and other 
modes of speech reign in their stead. And as at Long Whin- 
dale, so almost everywhere, the change has been emphasized 
by the disappearance of the old parsonage houses with their 
stone floors, their parlors lustrous with oak carving on chest or 
dresser, and their encircling farm-buildings and meadows, in 
favor of an upgrowth of new, trim mansions designed to meet 
the needs, not of peasants, but of gentlefolks. 

And naturally the churches too have shared in the process 
of transformation. The ecclesiastical revival of the last half 
century has worked its will even in the remotest corners of the 
Cumbrian country, and soon not a vestige of the homely wor- 
shiping-places of an earlier day will remain. Across the road, 
in front of the Long Whindale parsonage, for instance, rose a 
freshly built church, also peaked and gabled, with a spire and 
two bells, and a painted east window, and Heaven knows what 
novelties besides. The primitive whitewashed structure it re¬ 
placed had lasted long, and in the course of many generations 
time had clothed its moss-grown walls, its slated porch, and 
tombstones worn with rain in a certain beauty of congruity 
and association, linking it with the purple distanee of the fells, 
and the brawling river bending round the gray inclosure. But 
finally, after a period of quiet and gradual decay, the ruin of 
Long Whindale Cl)aj)el had become a quick and hurrying ruin 
that would not be arrested. When the rotten timbers of the 
roof came dropping on the farmers’ heads, and the oak benches 
beneath offered gaps the geography of wdiich had to be care¬ 
fully learned by the substantial persons who sat on them, lest 
they should be overtaken by undignified disaster ; when the 
rain poured in on the communion table, and the wind raged 
through innumerable mortarless chinks, even the slowly mov¬ 
ing folk of the valley came to the conclusion that “ summat 
’nil hev to be deun.” And by the help of the bishop and 
Queen Anne’s bounty, and what not, aided by just as many 


20 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


half-crowns as the valley found itself unable to defend against 
the encroachments of a new and moiderin ” parson, “ sum- 
mat ” was done, whereof the results—namely, the new church, 
vicarage, and school-house—were now conspicuous. 

This radical change, however, had not been the work of Mr. 
Thornburgh, but of his predecessor, a much more pushing and 
enterprising man, whose successful efforts to imjDrove the 
church accommodation in Long Whindale had moved such 
deep and lasting astonishment in the mind of a somewhat 
lethargic bishop, that promotion had been readily found for 
him. Mr. Thornburgh was neither capable of the sturdy beg¬ 
ging which had raised the church, nor was he likely on other 
lines to reach preferment. He and his wife, who possessed 
much more salience of character than he, were accepted in the 
dale as belonging to the established order of things. Nobody 
wished them any harm, and the few people they had specially 
befriended, naturally, thought well of them. 

But the old intimacy of relation which had once subsisted 
betweii the clergyman of Long Whindale and his parishioners 
was wholly gone. They had sunk in the scale ; the parson 
had risen. The old statesmen or peasant proprietors of the 
valley had for the most part succumbed to various destructive 
influences, some social, some economical, added to a certain 
amount of corrosion from within, and their place had been 
taken by leaseholders, less drunken perhaps, and better edu¬ 
cated, but also far less shrewd and individual, and lacking in 
the rude dignity of their precedessors. 

And as the land had lost, the church had gained. The place 
of the dalesmen knew them no more, but the church and par¬ 
sonage had got themselves rebuilt, the parson had had his in¬ 
come raised, had let off his glebe to a neighboring farmer, 
kept two maids, and drank claret when he drank anything. 
His flock were friendly enough, and paid their coiiimuted 
tithes without grumbling. But between them and a perfectly 
well-meaning but rather dull man, who stood on his dignity 
and wore a black coat all the week, there was no real com¬ 
munity. Rejoice in it as we may, in this final passage of 
Parson Primrose to social regions beyond the ken of Farmer 
Flamborough, there are some elements of loss, as there are in 
all changes. 

Wheels on the road ! Mrs. Thornburgh woke up with a start, 
and stumbling over newspaper and couvre-pied, hurried across 
the lawn as fast as her short, squat figure would allow, gray 
curls and cap-strings flying behind her. She heard a colloquy 
ill the distance in broad Westmoreland dialect, and as she 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


21 


turned the corner of the house she nearly ran into her tall 
cook, Sarah, whose impassive and saturnine countenance bore 
traces of unusual excitement. 

“Misses, there’s naw cakes. They’re all left behind on t’ 
counter at Randall’s. Mr. Backhouse says as how he told old 
Jim to go fur ’em, and he niver went, and Mr. Backhouse he 
niver found oot till he’d got past t’ bridge, and then it wur 
too late to go back.” 

Mrs. Thornburgh stood transfixed, something of her fresh 
pink color slowly deserting her face as she realized the enor¬ 
mity of the catastrophe. And was it possible that there was 
the faintest twinkle of grim satisfaction on the face of that 
elderly minx, Sarah ? 

Mrs. Thornburgh, however, did not stay to explore the re¬ 
cesses of Sarah’s mind, but ran with little pattering, undigni¬ 
fied steps across the front garden and down the steps to where 
Mr. Backhouse the carrier stood, bracing himself for self- 
defense. 

“ Ya may weel fret, mum,” said Mr. Backhouse, interrupt¬ 
ing the flood of her reproaches, with the comparative sang¬ 
froid of one who knew that, after all, he was the only carrier 
on the road, and that the vicarage was five miles from the nec¬ 
essaries of life ; “ it’s a bad job, and I’s not goin’ to say it isn’t. 
But ya jest look ’ere, mum, what’s a man to du wi’ a daft 
thingamy like that, as caah’t teak a plain order, and spiles a 
poor man’s business as caan’t help hissel’ ? ” 

And Mr. Backhouse pointed with withering scorn to a small, 
shrunken old man, who sat dangling his legs on the shaft of 
the cart, and whose countenance wore a singular expression of 
mingled meekness and composure, as his partner flourished an 
indignant finger toward him. 

“Jim ! cried Mrs. Thornburgh, reproachfully, “I did think 
you would have taken more pains about my order ! ” 

“ Yis, mum,” said the old man placidly, “ ya might’ a’ 
thowt it. I’s reet sorry, bit ya caan’t help these things sum- 
lime^ —an’ it’s naw gud a-hollerin’ ower ’em like a mad bull. 
Aa tuke yur bit paper to Randall’s and aa laft it wi’ ’em to 
mek up, an’ than aa, weel, aa went to a friend, an’ ee may 
hev giv’ me a glass of yale, aa doon’t say ee dud —but ee 
may, I ween’t sweer. Hawsomiver, aa niver thowt naw mair 
aboot it, nor mair did John, so ee needn’t taak—till we wur 
jest two mile from ’ere. An’ ee’s a gon’ on sense ! My ! an’ 
a larroping the poor beeast like onything ! ” 

Mrs. Thornburg stood aghast at the calmness of this auda¬ 
cious recital. As for John, he looked on surveying his 


22 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


brother’s philosophical demeanor at first with speechless 
wrath, and then with an inscrutable mixture of expressions, 
in which, however, any one accustomed to his weather-beaten 
countenance would have probably read a hidden admiration. 

‘‘ Weel, aa niver ! ” he exclaimed, when Jim’s explanatory 
remarks had come to an end, swinging himself up on to his 
seat and gathering up the reins. “ Yur a boald ’un to tell 
the missus theer to hur feeace as how ya wur ’tossicatit whan 
yur owt ta been duing yur larful business. Aa’ve doon wi' 
yer. Aa aims to please ma coostoniers, an’ aa caan’t abide 
sek wark. Yur like on oald kneyfe, I can mak’ nowt o’ ya’, 
nowder back nor edge.” 

Mrs. Thornburgh wrung her fat, short hands in despair, 
making little incoherent laments and suggestions as she saw 
him about to depart, of which John at last gathered the main 
purport to be that she wished him to go back to Whin- 
borough for her precious parcel. 

He shook his head compassionately over the preposterous 
state of mind betrayed by such a demand, and with a fresh 
burst of abuse of his brother, and an assurance to the vicar’s 
wife that he meant to “gie that oald man nawtice when he 
got haum ; he wasn’t goan to hev his bisness spiled for 
nowt by an oald ijiot wi’ a lied as full o’ yale as a hay-rick’s 
full of mice,” he raised his whip and the clattering vehicle 
moved forward ; Jim meanwhile preserving through all his 
brother’s wrath and Mrs. Thornburgh’s wailings the same 
mild and even countenance, the meditative and friendly 
aspect of the philosopher letting the world go “ as e’en it will.” 

So Mrs. Thornburgh was left gasping, watching the pro¬ 
gress of the lumbering cart along the bit of road leading to 
the hamlet at the head of the valley, with so limp and crest¬ 
fallen an aspect that even the gaunt and secretly jubilant 
Sarah was moved to pity. 

“ Whj^, missis, we’ll do very well. I’ll hev some scones in 
t’ oven in naw time, an’ timer’s finger biscuits, an’ wi’ buttered 
toast an’ sum o’ t’ best jams, if they don’t hev enuf to eat 
they ought to.” Then, dropping her voice, she asked, with a 
hurried change of tone : “ Did ye ask un’ hoo his daater is ? ” 

Mrs. Thornburgh started. Her pastoral conscience was 
smitten. She opened the gate and waved violently after the 
cart. John pulled his horse up, and with a few quick steps 
she brought herself within speaking, or rather shouting, 
distance. 

‘‘ How’s your daughter to-day, John ? ” 

Tlie old man’s face, peering round the oil-cloth hood of the 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


23 


cart, was darkened by a sudden cloud as lie caught the words. 
His stern lips closed. He muttered something inaudible to 
Mrs. Thornburgh and whipped up his horse again. The cart 
started olf, and Mrs. Thornburgh was left staring into the 
receding eyes of ‘‘ Jim the Noodle,” who, from his seat on the 
near shaft, regarded her with a gaze which had passed from 
benevolence into a preternatural solemnity. 

“ He sparin’ ov ’is speech is John Backhouse,” said Sarah, 
grimly, as her mistress returned to her. “May be ee’s 
aboot reet. It’s a bad business an’ ee’ll not mend it wi’ 
taakin’.” 

Mrs. Thornburgh, however, could not apply herself to the 
care of Mary Backhouse. At any other moment it would 
have excited in her breast the shuddering interest which, 
owing to certain peculiar attendant circumstances, it awakened 
in every other woman in Long Whindale. But her mind— 
such are the limitations of even clergyman’s wives—was now 
absorbed by her own misfortune. Her very cap-strings 
seemed to hang limp with depression, as she followed Sarah 
dejectedly into the kitchen, and gave what attention she 
could to those second-best arrangements so depressing to the 
idealist temper. 

Poor soul ! All the charm and glitter of her little social 
adventure was gone. When she once more emerged upon 
the lawn, and languidly readjusted her spectacles, she was 
weighed down by the thought that in two hours Mrs. Seaton 
would be upon her. Nothing of this kind ever happened to 
Mrs. Seaton. The universe obeyed her nod. No carrier con¬ 
veying goods to her august door ever got drunk or failed to 
deliver his consignment. The thing was inconceivable. Mrs. 
Thornburgh was w^ell aware of it. 

Should William be informed? Mrs. Tliornburgh had a 
rooted belief in the brutalitj^ of husbands in all domestic 
crises, and would have preferred not to inform him. But she 
had also a dismal certainty that the secret would burn a hole 
in her till it was confessed—bill and all. Besides frightful 
thought !—would they have to eat up all those meringues 
next day ? 

Her reflections at last became so depressing that, with a 
natural epicurean instinct, she tried violently to turn her 
mind away from them. Luckily she was assisted by a sudden 
perception of the roof and chimneys of Burwood, the Ley- 
burns’ house, peeping above the trees to the left. At sight 
of them a smile overspread her plump and gently wrinkled 
face. She fell gradually into a train of thought, as feminine 


24 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


as that in which she had just been indulging, but infinitely 
more pleasing. 

For, with regard to the Leyburns, at this present moment 
Mrs. Idiornburgh felt herself in the great position of tutelary 
divinity or guardian angel. At least if divinities and guard¬ 
ian angels do not concern themselves with the questions to 
which Mrs. Thornburgh’s mind was now addressed, it would 
clearly have been the opinion of the vicar’s wife that they 
ought to do so. 

‘‘ Who else is there to look after these girls, I should like 
to know,” Mrs. Thornburgh inquired of herself, “ if I don’t 
do it ? As if girls married themselves ! People may talk of 
their independence nowadays as much as they like—it always 
has to be done for them, one way or another. Mrs. Leyburn, 
poor lackadaisical thing ! is no good whatever. No more is 
Catherine. They both behave as if husbands tumbled into 
your mouth for the asking. Catherine’s too good for this 
world—but if she doesn’t do it, I must. Why, that girl Rose 
is a beauty—if they didn’t let her wear those ridiculous 
mustard-colored things, and do her hair fit to frighten the 
crows ! Agnes too—so lady-like and well-mannered ; she’d 
do credit to any man. Well, we shall see, we shall see ! ” 

And Mrs. Thornburgh gently shook her gray curls from 
side to side, while her eyes, fixed on the open spar^-room 
window, shone with meaning. 

“ So eligible, too—private means, no incumbrances, and as 
good as gold.” 

She sat lost a moment in a pleasing dream. 

“ Shall I bring oot the tea to you theer, mum ? ” called 
Sarah grufiiy, from the garden door. “ Master and Mr. 
Elsmere are just coomin’ down t’ field by t’ stepping-stones.” 

Mrs. Thornburgh signaled assent, and the tea-table was 
brought. Afternoon tea was b}^ no means a regular institu¬ 
tion at the vicarage of Long Whindale, and Saruh never sup¬ 
plied it without signs of protest. But when a guest was in 
the house Mrs. Thornburg insisted upon it : her obstinacy 
in the matter, like her dreams of cakes and confections, being 
all part of her determination to move with the times, in spite 
of the station to which Providence had assigned her. 

A minute afterward the vicar, a thick-set, gray-haired man 
of sixty, accompanied by a tall, younger man in clerical dress, 
emerged upon the lawn. 

“ Welcome sight! ” cried Mr. Thornburgh ; ‘‘ Robert and 
I have been coveting that tea for the last hour. You guessed 
very well, Emma, to have it just ready for us.” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


25 


Oh, that was Sarah. She saw you coming down to the 
stepping-stones,” replied liis wife, pleased, however, by any 
mark of appreciation from her mankind, however small. 
“ Robert, I hope you haven’t been walked off your legs ? ” 

“ What, in this air. Cousin Emma ? I could walk from sun¬ 
rise to sundown. Let no one call me an invalid any more. 
Henceforth I am a Hercules.” 

And he threw himself on the rug which Mrs. Thornburgh’s 
motherly providence had spread on the grass for him, with a 
smile and a look of supreme physical contentment, which did 
indeed almost efface the signs of recent illness in the ruddy 
boyish face. 

Mrs. Thornburg studied him ; her eye caught first of all by 
the stubble of reddish hair which as he took off his hat stood 
up straight and stiff all over his head with an odd wildness 
and aggressiveness. She involuntarily thought, basing her 
inward comment on a complexity of reasons—“Dear me, 
Avhat a pity ; it spoils his appearance ! ” 

“ I apologize, I apologize. Cousin Emma, once for all,” said 
the young man, surprising her glance, and despairingly 
smoothing down his recalcitrant locks. “ Let us hope that 
mountain air will quicken the pace of it before it is necessary 
for me to present a dignified appearance at Murewell.” 

He looked up at her with a merry flash in his gray eyes, 
and her old face brightened visibly as she realized afresh 
that in spite of the grotesqueness of his cropped hair, her 
guest was a most attractive creature. Not that he could 
l)oast much in the way of regular good looks : the mouth was 
large, the nose of no paidicular outline, and in general the 
cutting of the face, though strong and characteristic, had a 
bluntness and naivete like a vigorous, unfinished sketch. 
This bluntness of line, however, was balanced by a great 
delicacy of tint—the pink and white complexion of a girl, in¬ 
deed—enhanced by the bright reddish hair and quick gray eyes. 

The figure was also a little out of drawing, so to speak ; it 
was tall and loosely jointed. The general impression was 
one of agility and power. But if you looked closer you saw 
that the shoulders were narrow, the arms inordinately long, 
and the extremities too small for the general height. Robert 
Elsmere’s hand was the hand of a woman, and few people 
ever exchanged a first greeting with its very tall owner with¬ 
out a little shock of surprise. 

Mr. Thornburgh and his guest had visited a few houses in 
the course of their walk, and the vicar plunged for a minute 
or two into some conversation about local matters with his 


26 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


wife. But Mrs. Thornburgh, it was soon evident, was giving 
liini but a scatter-brained attention. Her secret was working 
in her ample breast. Very soon she could contain it no 
longer, and breaking in upon her husband’s parish news, she 
tumbled it all out pell-mell, with a mixture of discomfiture 
and defiance infinitely diverting. She could not keep a secret, 
but she also could not bear to give William an advantage. 

William certainly took his advantage. He did what liis 
wife in her irritation had precisely foreseen that he would do. 
He first stared, then fell into a guffaw of laughter, and as 
soon as he had recovered breath, into a series of unfeeling 
comments which drove Mrs. Thornburgh to desperation. 

“ If you will set your mind, my dear, on things we plain 
folks can do perfectly well without ”—et ccetera, et emtera — 
the husband’s point of view can be imagined. Mrs. Thorn¬ 
burgh could have shaken her good man, especially as there 
was nothing new to her in his remarks ; she had known to a 
T beforehand exactly what he would saj^ She took up her 
knitting in a great hurry, the needles clicking angrily, her 
gray curls quivering under the energy of her hands and arms, 
while she launched at her husband various retorts as to his 
lack of consideration for her efforts and her inconvenience, 
which were only very slightly modified by the presence of a 
stranger. 

Robert Elsmere meanwhile lay on the grass, his face dis¬ 
creetly turned away, an uncontrollable smile twitching the 
corners of his mouth. Everything was fresh and piquant up 
here in this remote corner of the north country, whether the 
mountain air or the wind-blown streams, or the manners and 
customs of the inhabitants. His cousin’s wife, in spite of her 
ambitious conventionalities, was really the child of Nature to 
a refreshing degree. One does not see these types, he said to 
himself, in the cultivated monotony of Oxford or London. 
She was like a bit of a by-gone world—Miss Austen’s or Miss 
Ferrier’s—unearthed for his amusement. He could not for 
the life of him help taking the scenes of this remote rural 
existence, which was quite new to him, as though they were 
the scenes of some comedy of manners. 

Presently, however, the vicar became aware that the pas¬ 
sage of arms between himself and his spouse was becoming 
just a little indecorous. He got up with a “ Hem ! ” intended 
to put an end to it, and deposited his cup. 

“ Well, my dear, have it as you please. It all comes of 
your determination to have Mrs. Seaton. Why couldn’t you 
just ask the Ley burns and let us enjoy ourselves ? ” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


21 


With this final shaft he departed to see that Jane, the little 
maid whom Sarah ordered about, had not, in cleaning the 
study for the evening’s festivities, put his last sermon into 
the waste-paper basket. Ilis wife looked after him with eyes 
that spoke unutterable things. 

‘‘You would never think,” she said in an agitated voice to 
young Elsmere, “ that I had consulted Mr. Thornburgh as to 
every invitation, that he entirely agreed with me that one 
must be civil to Mrs. Seaton, considering that she can make 
anybody’s life a burden to them about here that isn’t ; but 
it’s no use.” 

And she fell back on her knitting with redoubled energy, 
her face full of a half-tearful intensity of meaning. Robert 
Elsmere restrained a strong inclination to laugh, and set him¬ 
self instead to distract and console her. He expressed sym¬ 
pathy with her difficulties, he talked to her about her party, 
he got from her the names and histories of the guests. How 
Miss Austenish it sounded ; the managing rector’s wife, her 
still more managing old maid of a sister, the neighboring 
clergyman who played the flute, the local doctor, and a pretty 
daughter just out—“Very pretty,” sighed Mrs. Thornburgh, 
who was now depressed all round, “but all flounces and frills 
and nothing to say ”—and last of all, those three sisters, the 
Leyburns, who seemed to be on a different level, and whom he 
heard mentioned so often since his arrival by both husband 
and wife. 

“ Tell me about the Miss Leyburns,” he said, presently. 
“You and Cousin William seem to have a great affection for 
them. Do you live near ?” 

“ Oh, quite close,” cried Mrs. Thornburgh, brightening at 
last, and like a great general, leaving one scheme in ruins, 
only the more ardently to take up another. “ There is the 
house,” and she pointed out Burwood among its trees. Then 
with her eye eagerly fixed upon him, she fell into a more or 
less incoherent account of her favorites. She laid on her 
colors thickly, and Elsmere at once assumed extravagance. 

“ A saint, a beauty, and a wit all to yourselves in these 
wilds ! ” he said, laughing. “What luck ! But what on 
earth brought them here—a widow and three daughters— 
from the south ? It was an odd settlement surely, though 
you have one of the loveliest valleys and the purest airs in 
England.” 

“ Oh, as to lovely valleys,” said Mrs. Thornburgh, sighing, 
“ I think it very dull ; I always have. When one has to de¬ 
pend for everything on a carrier that gets drunk, too ! Why, 


28 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


you know they belong here. They’re real Westmoreland 
people.” 

“ What does that mean exactly ?” 

‘‘ Oh, their grandfather was a farmer, just like one of the 
common farmers about. Only his land was his own, and 
theirs isn’t.” 

“ He was one of the last of the statesmen,” interposed Mr. 
Thornburgh—who, having rescued his sermon from Jane’s 
tender mercies, and put out his modest claret and sherry for 
for the evening, had strolled out again and found himself 
impelled as usual to put some precision into his wife’s state¬ 
ments—‘‘ one of the small freeholders who have almost dis¬ 
appeared here as elsewhere. The story of the Leyburns 
always seems to me typical of many things.” 

Robert looked inquiry, and the vicar, sitting down—having 
first picked up liis wife’s ball of wool as a peace-offering, 
which was loftily accepted—launched into a narrative which 
may be here somewhat condensed. 

The Leyburns’ grandfather, it appeared, had been a typi¬ 
cal north country peasant—honest, with strong passions both 
of love and hate, thinking nothing of knocking down his wife 
with a poker, and frugal in all things save drink. Drink, 
however, was ultimately his ruin, as it was the ruin of most 
of the Cumberland statesmen. “ The people about here,” 
said the vicar, “ say he drank away an acre a year. Jle had 
some fifty acres, and it took about thirty years to beggar him.” 

Meanwhile this brutal, rollicking, strong-natured person 
had sons and daughters—plenty of them. Most of them, even 
the daughters, were brutal and rollicking too. Of one of the 
daughters, now dead, it was reported that, having on one 
occasion discovered her father, then an old, infirm man, sitting 
calmly by the fire beside the prostrate form of his wife, whom 
he had just felled with his crutch, she had taken off her 
wooden shoe and given her father a clout on the head which 
left his gray hair streaming with blood ; after which she had 
calmly put the horse into the cart, and driven off to fetch the 
doctor to both her parents. But among this grim and earthly 
crew there was one exception, a “ hop out of kin,” of whom 
all the rest made, sport. This was the second son, Richard, 
who showed such a persistent tendency to “ book lamin’,” 
and such a persistent idiocy in all matters pertaining to the 
land, that nothing was left to the father at last but to send 
him with many oaths to the grammar school at Whinborough. 
From the moment the boy got a footing in the school he 
hardly cost his father another penny. He got a local bursary 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


29 


which paid his school expenses, he never missed a remove or 
failed to gain a prize, and finally won a close scholarship 
which carried him triumphantly to Queen’s College. 

His family watched his progress with a gaping, half-con¬ 
temptuous amazement, till he announced himself as safely in¬ 
stalled at Oxford, having borrowed from a Whinborough 
patron the modest sum necessary to pay his college valuation— 
a sum which wild horses could not have dragged out of his 
father, now sunk over head and ears in debt and drink. 

From that moment they practically lost sight of him. He 
sent the class list which contained his name among the Firsts 
to his father ; in the same way he communicated the news of 
his fellowship at Queen’s, his ordination, and his appointment 
to the headhaastership of a south-country grammar school. 
None of his communications were ever answered till, in the 
very last year of his father’s life, the eldest son, who had a’ 
shrewder eye all round to the main chance than the rest, 
applied to “ Dick ” for cash wherewith to meet some of the 
family necessities. The money was promptly sent, together 
with photogi*aphs of Dick’s wife and children. These last 
were not taken much notice of. These Leyburns were a hard, 
limited, incurious set, and they no longer regarded Dick as 
one of themselves. 

“ Then came the old man’s death,” said Mr. Thornburgh. 
“ It happened the year after I took the living. Richard 
Leyburn was sent for and came. I never saw such a scene in 
my life as the funeral supper. It was kept up in the old 
style. Three of Leyburn’s sons were there : two of them 
farmers like himself, one a clerk from Manchester, a daughter 
married to a tradesman in Whinborough, a brother of the old 
man, who was under the table before supper was half over, and 
so on. Richard Leyburn wrote to ask me to come, and I went 
to support his cloth. But I was new to the jfiace,” said the 
vicar, flushing a little, “ and they belonged to a race that had 
never been used to pay much respect to parsons. To see that 
man among the rest ! He was thin and dignified ; he looked 
to me as if he had all the learning imaginable, and he had 
large, absent-looking eyes which, as George, the eldest brother, 
said, gave you the impression of some one that ‘ had lost some¬ 
thin’ when he was nobbut a lad, and had gone seekin’ it iver 
sence.’ He was formidable to me ; but between us we 
couldn’t keep the rest of the party in order, so when the orgie 
had gone on a certain time, we left it and went out into the 
air. It was an August night. I remember Leyburn threw 
back his head and drank it in. ‘ I haven’t breathed this air 


30 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


for five-and-twenty years,’ he said. ‘ I thought I hated the 
place, and in spite of that drunken crew in there, it draws me 
to it like a magnet. I feel, after all, that I have the fells in 
my blood.’ He was a curious man, a refined looking, melan¬ 
choly creature, with a face that reminded you of Words¬ 
worth, and cold, donnish ways, except to his children and the 
poor. I always thought his life had disappointed him some¬ 
how.” 

“ Yet one would think,” said Robert, opening his eyes, 
“ that he had made a very considerable success of it! ” 

“ Well, I don’t know how it was,” said the vicar, whose 
analysis of character never went very far. “ Anyhow, next 
day he went peering about the place and the mountains and 
the lands Ms father had lost. And George, the el'dest brother, 
who had inherited the farm, watched him without a word, in 
the way these Westmoreland folk have, and at the last offered 
him what remained of the place for a fancy price. I told him 
it was a preposterous sum, but he wouldn’t bargain. ‘ I shall 
bring my wife and children here in the holidays,’ he said, ‘ and 
the money will set George up in California.’ So he paid 
through the nose, and got possession of the old house, in which, 
I should think, he had passed about as miserable a childhood 
as it was possible to pass. There’s no accounting for tastes.” 

“ And then the next summer they all came down,” inter¬ 
rupted Mrs. Thornburgh. She disliked a long story as she 
disliked being read aloud to. “ Catherine was fifteen, not a 
bit like a child. You used to see her everywhere with her 
father. To my mind he was always exciting her brain too 
much, but he was a man you could not say a word to. I 
don’t care what William says about his being like Words¬ 
worth ; he just gave you the blues to look at.” 

‘‘ It was so strange,” said the vicar meditatively, “ to see 
them in that house. If you knew the things that used to go 
on there in old days—the savages that lived there. And then 
to see those three delicately brought-up children going in and 
out of the parlor where old Leyburn used to sit smoking and 
drinking ; and Dick Lej^burn walking about in a white tie, 
and the men touching their hats to him who had belabored 
him when he was a boy at the village school—it was queer.” 

“A curious little bit of social history,” said Elsmere. 
“ Well, and then he died, and the family lived on ? ” 

“ Yes, he died the year after he bought the place. And 
perhaps the most interesting thing of all has been the develop¬ 
ment of his eldest daughter. She has watched over her 
mother, she has brought up her sisters ; but much more than 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


31 


that: she has become a sort of Deborah in these y illeys,” 
said the vicar, smiling. “ I don’t count for much, she counts 
for a great deal. I can’t get the people to tell me their secrets, 
she can. There is a sort of natural sympathy between them 
and her. She nurses then, she scolds them, she preaches to 
them, and they take it from her when they won’t take it from 
us. Perhaps it is the feeling of blood. Perhaps they think 
it as mysterious a dispensation of Providence, as I do, that that 
brutal, swearing, whisky-drinking stock should have ended 
in anything so saintly and so beautiful as Catherine Ley^ 
burn.” 

The quiet, commonplace clergyman spoke with a sudden 
tremor of feeling. His wife, however, looked at him with a 
dissatisfied expression. 

“ You always talk,” she said, “ as if there were no one but 
Catherine. People generally like the other two much better-. 
Catherine is so stand-off.” 

“ Oh, the other two are very well,” said the vicar, but in a 
different tone. 

Robert sat ruminating. Presently his host and hostess 
went in, and the young man went sauntering up the climbing 
garden-path to the point where only a railing divided it from 
the fell-side. From here his eye commanded the whole of 
the upper end of the valley—a bare, desolate recess filled 
with evening shadow, and walled round by masses of gray and 
purple crag, except in one spot, where a green intervening 
fell marked the course of the pass connecting the dale with 
the Ullswater district. Below him were church and parson¬ 
age ; beyond the stone-filled babbling river, edged by 
intensely green fields, which melted imperceptibly into the 
browner stretches of the opposite mountain. Most of the 
scene, except where the hills at the end rose highest and shut 
out the sun, was bathed in quiet light. The white patches on 
the farm-houses, the heckberry trees along the river and the 
road, caught and emphasized the golden rajs which were 
flooding into the lower valley as into a broad green cup. 
Close by, in the little vicarage orchard, were fruit-trees in 
blossom ; the air was mild and fragrant, though to the young 
man from the warmer south there was still a bracing quality 
in the soft western breeze which blew about liim. 

He stood there bathed in silent enchantment, an eager 
nature going out to meet and absorb into itself the beauty 
and peace of the scene. Lines of Wordsworth were on his 
lips ; the little, well-worn volume was in his pocket, but he 
did not need to bring it out ; and his voice had all a poet’s 


32 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


intensity of emphasis as he strolled along, reciting under his 
breath : 

“ It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, 

The holy time is quiet as a nun 
Breathless with adoration ! ” 

Presently his eye was once more caught by the roof of 
Bur wood, lying beneath him on its promontory of land, in 
the quiet shelter of its protecting trees. He stopped, and a 
delicate sense of harmonious association awoke in him. That 
girl, atoning as it were by her one white life for all the crimes 
and coarseness of her ancestry ; the idea of her seemed to 
steal into the solemn golden evening and give it added poetry 
and meaning. The young man felt a sudden strong curiosity 
to see her. 

CHAPTER III. 

The festal tea had begun, and Mrs. Thornburgh was pre¬ 
siding. Opposite to her, on the vicar’s left, sat the formid¬ 
able rector’s wife. Poor Mrs. Thornburgh had said to her¬ 
self as she entered the room on the arm of Mr. May hew, the 
incumbent of the neighboring valley of Shanmoor, that the 
first coup d’oeil was good. The flowers had been arranged in 
the afternoon by Rose ; Sarah’s exertions had made the silver 
shine again ; a pleasing odor of good food underlay the scent 
of the bluebells and fern ; and what with the snowy table- 
linen, and the pretty dresses and bright faces of the younger 
people, the room seemed to be full of an incessant play of 
crisp and delicate color. 

But just as the vicar’s wife was sinking into her seat with 
a little sigh of wearied satisfaction, she caught sight sud¬ 
denly of an eyeglass at the other end of the table slowly 
revolving in a large and jeweled hand. The judicial eye 
behind the eyeglass travelled round the table, lingering, as* it 
seemed to Mrs. Thornburgh’s excited consciousness, on every 
spot where cream or jelly or meringue should have been and 
was not. When it dropped with a harsh little click, the 
hostess, unable to restrain herself, rushed into desperate con¬ 
versation with Mr. Mayhew, giving vent to incoherencies in 
the course of the first act of the meal which did but confirm 
her neighbor—a grim, uncommunicative person—in his own 
devotion to a policy of silence. Meanwhile, the vicar was 
grappling on very unequal terms with Mrs. Seaton. Mrs. 
Leyburn had fallen to young Elsmere. Catherine Leyburn 
was paired off with Dr. Baker, Agnes with Mr. Mayhew’s 
awkward son—a tongue-tied youth, lately an unattached 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


33 


student at Oxford, but now relegated, owing to an invincible 
antipathy to Greek verbs, to his native air, till some other 
opening into the great world should be discovered for him. 

Rose was on Robert Elsmere’s right. Agnes had coaxed 
her into a white dress as being the least startling garment 
she possessed, and she was like a Stothard picture with her 
high waist, her blue sash ribbon, her slender neck and bril¬ 
liant head. She had already cast man}^ curious glances at the 
Thornburghs’ guest. “ Not a prig, at any rate,” she thought 
to herself with satisfaction, “ so Agnes is quite wrong.” 

As for the young man, who was, to begin with, in that 
state which so often follows on the long confinement of 
illness, when the light seems brighter and scents keener and 
experience sharper than at other times, he was inwardly con¬ 
fessing that Mrs. Thornburgh had not been romancing. The 
vivid creature at his elbow, with her still unsoftened angles 
and movements, was in the first dawn of an exceptional 
beauty ; the plain sister had struck him before supper in the 
course of twenty minutes’ conversation as above the average 
in point of manners and talk. As to Miss Leyburn, he had 
so far only exchanged a bow with her, but he was watching 
her now, as he sat opposite to her, out of his quick, observant 
eyes. 

She, too, was in white. As she turned to speak to the 
youth at her side, Elsmere caught the fine outline of the head, 
the unusually clear and perfect molding of the brow, nose, 
and upper lip. The hollows in the cheek struck him, and the 
way in which the breadth of the forehead somewhat over¬ 
balanced the delicacy of the mouth and chin. The face, 
though still quite young, and expressing a perfect physical 
health, had the look of having been polished and refined away 
to its foundations. There was not an ounce of superfluous 
flesh on it, and not a vestige of Rose’s peach-like bloom. 
Her profile, as he saw it now, had the firmness, the clear 
whiteness, of a profile on a Greek gem. 

She was actually making that silent, awkward lad talk ! 
Robert, who, out of his four years’ experience as an Oxford 
tutor, had an abundant compassion for and understanding of 
such beings as young Mayhew, watched her with a pleased 
amusement, wondering how she did it. What ? Had she 
got him on carpentering, engineering—discovered his weak 
point ? Water-wheels, inventors, steam-engines—and the 
lumpish lad all in a glow, taking away nineteen to the dozen. 
What tact^ what kindness in her gray blue eyes ! 

But he was interrupted by Mrs. Seaton, who was perfectly 


34 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


well aware that she had beside her a stranger of some prestige, 
an Oxford man, and a member, besides, of a well-known 
Sussex county family. She was a large and commanding 
person, clad in black moire silk. She wore a velvet diadem, 
Honiton lace lappets, and a variety of chains, beads, and 
bangles bestrewn about her that made a tinkling as she 
moved. Fixing her neighbor with a bland majesty of eye, 
she inquired of him if he were “any relation of Sir Mowbray 
Elsmere ? ” Robert replied that Sir Mowbray Elsmere was 
his father’s cousin, and the patron of the living to which he 
had just been appointed. Mrs. Seaton then , graciously 
informed him that long ago—“ when I was a girl in my native 
Hampshire ”—her family and Sir Mowbray Elsmere had been 
on intimate terms. Her father had been devoted to Sir Mow¬ 
bray. “ And I,” she added, with an evident though lofty 
desire to please, “ retain an inherited respect, sir, for your 
name.” 

Robert bowed, but it was not clear from his look that the 
rector’s wife had made an impression. His general concep¬ 
tion of his relative and patron. Sir Mowbray—who had been 
for many years the family black sheep—was, indeed, so far 
removed from any notions of “ respect,” that he had some 
difficulty in keeping his countenance under the lady’s look 
and pose. He would have been still more entertained had he 
known the nature of the intimacy to which she referred. 
Mrs. Seaton’s father, in his capacity of solicitor in a small 
countrv town, had acted as electioneering agent for Sir Mow¬ 
bray (then plain Mr.) Elsmere on two occasions—in 18—, 
when his client had been triumphantly returned at a bye- 
election ; and two years later, when a repetition of the 
tactics so successful in the previous contest led to a petition, 
and to the disappearance of the heir to the Elsmere property 
from parliamentary life. 

Of these matters, however, he was ignorant, and Mrs. 
Seaton did not enlighten him. Drawing herself up a little, 
and proceeding in a more neutral tone thali before, she pro¬ 
ceeded to put him through a catechism on Oxford, alternately 
cross-examining him and expounding to him her own views 
and her husband’s on the functions of universities. She and 
the archdeacon conceived that the Oxford authorities were 
mainly occupied in ruining the young men’s health by over¬ 
examination, and poisoning their minds by free-thinking 
opinions. In her belief, if it went on, the mothers of England 
would refuse to send their sons to these ancient but deadly 
resorts. She looked at him sternly as she spoke, as though 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


35 


defying him to be flippant in return. And he, indeed, did his 
polite best to be serious. 

But it somewhat disconcerted him in the middle to find 
Miss Leyburn’s eyes upon him. And undeniably there was a 
spark of laughter in them, quenched, as soon as his glance 
crossed hers, under long lashes. How that spark had lighted 
up the grave, pale face ! He longed to provoke it agani, to 
cross over to her and say : “ What amused you ! Ho you 
think me very young and simple? Tell me about these 
people.” 

But, instead, he made friends with Rose. Mrs. Seaton was 
soon engaged in giving the vicar advice on his parochial 
affairs, an experience which generally ended by the appear¬ 
ance of certain truculent elements in one of the mildest of 
men. So Robert was free to turn to his girl neighbor and 
ask her what people meant by calling the Lakes rainy. 

“ I understand it is pouring at Oxford. To-day your sky 
here has been without a cloud, and your rivers are running 
dry.” 

“ And you have mastered our climate in twenty-four hours, 
like the tourists—isn’t it ?—that do the Irish question in 
three weeks ? ” 

‘‘Rot the answer of a bread-and-butter miss,” he thought 
to himself, amused, “ and yet what a child it looks.” 

He threw himself into a war of words with her, and en¬ 
joyed it extremely. Her brilliant coloring, her gestures as 
fresh and untamed as the movements of the leaping river 
outside,^the mixture in her of girlish pertness and ignorance, 
with the promise of a remarkable general capacity, made her 
a most taking, provoking creature. Mrs. Thornburgh—much 
recovered in mind since Hr. Baker had praised the pancakes 
by which Sarah had sought to prove to her mistress the super¬ 
fluity of naughtiness involved in her recourse to foreign 
cooks—watched the young man and maiden with a face 
which grew more and more radiant. The conversation in the 
garden had not pleased her. Why should people always talk 
of Catherine ; Mrs. Thornburgh stood in awe of Catherine, 
and had given her up in despair. It was the other two whose 
fortunes, as possibly directed by her, filled her maternal heart 
with sympathetic emotion. 

Suddenly in the midst of her satisfaction she had a rude 
shock. What on earth was the vicar doing ? After thej^ had 
got through better than any one co^ld have hoped, thanks to 
a discreet silence and Sarah’s make-shifts, there was the 
master of the house pouring the whole tale of his wife’s as- 


36 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


pirations and disappointment into Mrs. Seaton’s ear ! If it 
were ever allowable to rush upon your husband at table and 
stop his mouth with a dinner napkin, Mrs. Thornburgh could 
at this moment have performed such a feat. She nodded and 
coughed and fidgeted in vain ! 

The vicar’s confidences were the result of a fit of nervous 
exasperation. Mrs. Seaton had just embarked upon an ac¬ 
count of “ our charming time with Lord Fleckwood.” Kow, 
Lord Fleckwood was a distant cousin of Archdeacon Seaton, 
and the great magnate of the neighborhood, not, however, a 
very respectable magnate. Mr. 'ILornburgli had heard ac¬ 
counts of Lupton Castle from Mrs. Seaton on at least half a 
dozen different occasions. Privately he believed them all to 
refer to one visit, an event of immemorial antiquity period¬ 
ically brought up to date by Mrs. Seaton’s imagination. But 
the vicar was a timid man, without the courage of his opin¬ 
ions, and in his eagerness to stop the flow of his neighbor’s 
eloquence he could think of no better device, or more suitable 
rival subject, than to plunge into the story of the drunken car¬ 
rier, and the pastry still reposing on the counter at Randall’s. 

He blushed, good man, when he was well in it. His wife’s 
horrified countenance embarrassed him. But anything was 
better than Lord Fleckwood. Mrs. Seaton listened to him 
with the slightest smile on her formidable lip. The story 
was pleasing to her. 

‘‘At least, my dear sir,” she said when he paused, nodding 
her diademed head with stately emphasis, “ Mrs. Thorn¬ 
burgh’s inconvenience may have one good result. You can 
now make an example of the carrier. It is our special busi¬ 
ness, as my husband always says, who are in authority, to 
bring their low vices home to these people.” 

The vicar fidgeted in his chair. What inaptitude had he 
been guilty of now! By way of avoiding Lord Fleckwood 
he might have started Mrs. Seaton on teetotalism. Now, if 
there was one topic on which this awe-inspiring woman was 
more awe-inspiring than another it was on the topic of teeto¬ 
talism. The vicar had already felt himself a criminal as he 
drank his modest glass of claret under her eye. 

“ Oh, the drunkenness about here is pretty bad,”' said Dr. 
Baker, from the other end of the table. “ But there are 
plenty of Avorse things in these valleys. Besides, what person 
in his senses Avould think of trying to disestablish John Back¬ 
house ? He and his qne^r brother are as much a feature of 
the valley as High Fell. We have too few originals left to 
be so very particular about trifles.” 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


37 


“ Trifles ? ” repeated Mrs. Seaton, in a deep voice, throwing 
np her eyes. But slie would not venture an argument with 
Dr. Baker. He had all the cheery self-confidence of the old 
established local doctor, Avho knows himself to be a power, 
and neither Mrs. Seaton nor her restless, intriguing little 
husband had ever yet succeeded in putting him down. 

“ You must see these two old characters,” said Dr. Baker 
to Elsmere across the the table. “ They are relics of a West¬ 
moreland which will soon have disappeared. Old John, Avho 
is going on for seventy, is as tough an old dalesman as ever 
you saw. He doesn’t measure his cups, but he would scorn 
to be floored by them. I don’t believe he does drink much, 
but if he does there is probably no amount of whisky that 
he couldn’t carry. Jim, the other brother, is about five years 
older. He is a kind of softie—all alive on one side of his 
brain, and a noodle on the other. A single glass of rum and 
water puts him under the table. And as he can never refuse 
this glass, and as the temptation generally seizes him when 
they are on their rounds, he is always getting John into dis¬ 
grace. John swears at him and slangs him. No use. Jim 
sits still, looks—well, nohow. I never saw an old creature 
with a more singular gift of denuding his face of all ex¬ 
pression. John vows he shall go to the ‘house’ ; he has no 
legal share in the business ; the house and the horse and cart 
are John’s. Next day you see them on the cart again just as 
usual. In reality neither brother can do without the other. 
And three days after, the play begins again.” 

“ An improving spectacle for the valley,” said Mrs. Seaton 
dryly. 

“ Oh, my dear madam,” said the doctor, shrugging his 
shoulders, “ we can’t all be so virtuous. If old Jim is a 
drunkard, he has got a heart of his own somewhere, and can 
nurse a dying niece like a woman. Miss Leyburn can tell us 
something about that.” 

And he turned round to his neighbor with a complete 
change of expression, and a voice that had a new note in it 
of affectionate respect. Catherine colored as if she did nOo 
like being addressed on the subject, and just nodded a little 
with gentle affirmative eyes. 

“ A strange case,” said Dr. Baker, again looking at Elsmere. 
“ It is a family that is original and old-world even in its ways 
of dying. I have been a doctor in these j^arts for five-and- 
twenty years. I have seen what you may call old AYestmore- 
land out—costume, dialect, suj^erstitions. At least, as to 

dialect, the people have become bi-lingual. I sometimes think 


38 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


they talk it to each other as much as ever, but some of them 
won’t talk it to you and me at all. And as to superstitions, 
the only ghost story I know that still has some hold on popu¬ 
lar belief is the one which attaches to this mountain here, 
High Fell, at the end of this valley.” 

He paused a moment. A salutary sense has begun to 
penetrate even modern provincial society, that no man may 
tell a ghost story without leave. Rose threw a merry glance 
at him. They two were very old friends. Dr. Baker had 
pulled out her first teeth and given her a sixpence after¬ 
ward for each operation. The pull was soon forgotten ; the 
sixpence lived on gratefully in a child’s warm memory. 

“Tell it,” she said; “we give you leave. We won’t 
interrupt you unless you put in too many inventions.” 

“You invite me to break the first law of story-telling. Miss 
Rose,” said the doctor, lifting a finger at her. “ Every man 
is bound to leave a story better than he found it. However, 
I couldn’t tell it if I would. I don’t know what makes the 
poor ghost walk ; and if you do 1 shall say you invent. But 
at any rate there is a ghost, and she walks along the side of 
High Fell at midnight every Midsummer-day. If you see 
her and she passes you in silence, why you only get a fright 
for your pains. But if she speaks to you, you die Avithin the 
year. Old John Backhouse is a widoAver with one daughter. 
This girl saAV the ghost last Midsummer-day, and Miss Ley- 
burn and I are now doing our best to keep her alive over the 
next; but Avitli very small prospect of success.” 

“What is the girl dying of—fright?” asked Mrs. Seaton, 
harshl}'-. 

“ Oh, no ! ” said the doctor, hastily, “ not precisely. A sad 
story ; better not inquire into it. But at the present moment 
the time of her death seems likely to be determined by the 
strength of her OAvn and other people’s belief in the ghost’s 
summons.” 

Mrs. Seaton’s grim mouth relaxed into an ungenial smile. 
She put up her eyeglass and looked at Catherine. “ An un¬ 
pleasant household, I should imagine,” she said shortly, “ for 
a young lady to visit.” 

Dr. Ilaker looked at the rector’s wife, and-a kind of flame 
came into his' eyes. He and Mrs. Seaton were old enemies, 
and he was a quick-tempered, mercurial sort of man. 

“ I presume that one’s guardian angel may have to follow 
one sometimes into unpleasant quarters,” he said hotly. “ If 
this girl lives it Avill be Miss Leyburn’s doing ; if she dies, 
saved and comforted, instead of lost in this Avoiid and the 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


39 


next, it will be Miss Leyburn’s doing, too. Ah, my dear 
young lady, let me alone ! You tie my tongue always, and I 
won’t have it.” 

And the doctor turned his weather-beaten, elderly face upon 
her with a look which was half defiance and half apology. 
She, on her side, had flushed painfully, laying her white 
finger-tips imploringly on his arm. Mrs. Seaton turned away 
with a little dry cough, as did her spectacled sister at the 
other end of the table. Mrs. Leyburn, on the other hand, sat 
in a little ecstasy, looking at Catherine and Dr. Baker, some¬ 
thing glistening in her eyes. Robert Elsmere alone showed 
presence of mind. Bending across to Dr. Baker, he asked 
him a sudden question as to the history of a certain strange 
green mound or barrow that rose out of a flat field not far 
from the vicarage windows. Dr. Baker grasped his whiskers, 
threw the young man a queer glance, and replied. Thencefor¬ 
ward he and Robert kept up a lively antiquarian talk on the 
traces of Rorse settlement in the Cumbrian valleys, which 
lasted till the ladies left the dining-room. 

As Catherine Leyburn went out, Elsmere stood holding the 
door open. She could not help raising her eyes upon him, 
eyes full of a half-timid, half-grateful friendliness. His own 
returned her look with interest. 

‘‘ ‘ A spirit, but a Avoman, too,’ ” he thought to himself, with 
a new-born thrill of sympathy, as he went back to his seat. 
She had not yet said a direct word to him, and yet he was 
curiously convinced that here was one of the most interesting 
persons, and one of the persons most interesting to him, that 
he had ever met. What mingled delicacy and strength in the 
hand that had lain beside her on the dinner-table—what poten¬ 
tial depths of feeling in the full, dark-fringed eye! 

Half an hour later, when Elsmere re-entered the drawing¬ 
room, he found Catherine Leyburn sitting by an open French 
Avindow that looked out on the lawn and on the dim, rocky 
face of the fell. Adeline Baker, a stooping, red-armed maiden, 
Avith a pretty face, set olf, as she imagined, by a vast amount 
of cheap finery, was sitting beside her, studying her with a 
timid adoration. The doctor’s daughter regarded Catherine 
Leyburn, who during the last five years had made herself 
almost as distinct a figure in the popular imagination of a feAV 
Westmoreland valleys as Sister Dora among her Walsall 
miners, as a being of a totally dilferent order from herself. 
She was glued to the side of her idol, but her shy and awk¬ 
ward tongue could find hardly anything to say to her. Cathe¬ 
rine, however, talked away, gently stroking the while the girl’s 


40 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


rough hand which lay on her knee, to the mingled pain and 
bliss of its owner, who was outraged by the contrast between 
her own ungainly member and Miss Leyburn’s delicate fingers. 

Mrs. Seaton was on the sofa beside Mrs. Thornburgh, amply 
avenging herself on the vicar’s wife for any checks she might 
have received at tea. Miss Barks, her sister, an old maid with 
a face that seemed to be perpetually peering forward, light 
colorless hair surmounted by a cap adorned with artificial 
nasturtiums, and white-lashed eyes armed with spectacles, 
was having her way with Mrs. Le 5 "burn, inquiring into the 
household arrangements of Burwood with a cross-examining 
power which made the mild widow as pulp before her. 

When the gentlemen entered, Mrs. Thornburgh looked round 
hastily. She herself had opened that door into the garden. 
A garden on a warm summer night offers opportunities no 
schemer should neglect. Agnes and Rose were chattering 
and laughing on the gravel path just outside it, their white 
girlish figures showing temptingly against the dusky back¬ 
ground of garden and fell. It somewhat disappointed the 
vicar’s wife to see her tall guest take a chair and draw it be¬ 
side Catherine—while Adeline Baker awkwardly got up and 
disappeared into the garden. 

Elsinere felt it an unusually interesting moment, so strong 
had been his sense of attraction at tea ; but like the rest of 
us he could find nothing more telling to start with than a 
remark about the weather. Catherine, in her reply, asked him 
if he were quite recovered from the attack of low fever he was 
understood to have been suffering from. 

“ Oh, yes,” he said, brightly. “ I am very nearly as fit as I 
ever was, and more eager than I ever was to get to work. 
The idling of it is the worst part of illness. However, in a 
month from now I must be at my living, and I can only hope 
it will give me enough to do.” 

Catherine looked up at him with a quick impulse of liking. 
What an eager face it was ! Eagerness, indeed, seemed to be 
the note of the whole man, of the quick eyes and mouth, the 
flexible hands and energetic movements. Even the straight, 
stubbly hair, its owner’s passing torment, standing up round 
the high, open brow, seemed to help the general impression of 
alertness and vigor. 

“Your mother, I hear, is already there? ” said Catherine. 

“ Yes. My poor mother ! ” and the young man smiled half 
sadly. “ It is a curious situation for both of us. This living 
which has just been bestowed on me is my father’s old living. 
It is in the gift of my cousin. Sir Mowbra}^ Elsmere. My 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


41 


great-uncle ”—he drew himself together suddenly. “ But 1 
don’t know why I should imagine that these things interest 
other people,” he said, with a little quick, almost comical, 
accent of self-rebuke. 

“Please go on,” cried Catherine hastily. The,voice and 
manner were singularly pleasant to her ; she wished he would 
not interrupt himself for nothing. 

“Really? Well, then, my great-uncle, old Sir William, 
wished me to have it when I grew up. I was against it for a 
long time, but in the end I took Orders ; but I wanted some¬ 
thing more stirring than a country parish. One has dreams 
of many things. But one’s dreams come to nothing. I got ill 
at Oxford. The doctor forbade the town work. The old 
incumbent who had held the living since my father’s death 
died precisely at that moment. I felt myself booked, and 
gave in to various friends ; but it is second best.” 

She felt a certain soreness and discomfort in his tone, as 
though his talk represented a good deal of mental struggle in 
the past. 

“But the country is not idleness,” she said, smiling at liim. 
Her cheek was leaning lightly on her hand, her eyes had an 
unusual animation ; and her long, white dress, guiltless of any 
ornament save a small, old-fashioned locket hangling from a 
thin old chain and a pair of hair bracelets with engraved gold 
clasps, gave her the nobleness and simplicity of a Romney 
picture. 

“ You do not find it so, I imagine,” he replied, bending for¬ 
ward to her, with a charming gesture of homage. He would 
have liked her to talk to him of her work and her interests. 
He, too, mentally compared her to Saint Elizabeth. He could 
almost have fancied the dark red flowers in her white 
lap. But his comparison had another basis of feeling than 
Rose’s. 

However, she would not talk to him of herself. The way 
in which she turned the conversation brought home to his OAvn 
expansive, confiding nature a certain austerity and stiffness of 
fiber in her which for tlie moment chilled him. But as he got 
her into talk about the neighborhood, the people and their 
ways, the impression vanished again, so far at least as thei-e 
was anything rej^elled about it. Austerity, strength, individ¬ 
uality, all these words indeed he was more and more driven to 
apply to her. She was like no other woman he had ever seen. 
It was not at all that she was more remarkable intellectually. 
Every now and then, indeed, as their talk flowed on, he noticed 
in what she said an absence of a good many interests and 


42 


ROBmT EL8MERE. 


attainments which in his ordinary south-country women friends 
he would have assumed as a matter of course. 

“ I understand French very little, and I never read any,” 
she said to him once, quietly, as he fell to comparing some 
peasant story she had told him with an episode in one of 
George Sand’s Berry novels. It seemed to him that she knew 
her Wordsworth by heart. And her own mountain life, her 
own rich and meditative soul, had taught her judgments and 
comments on her favorite poet which stirred Elsmere every 
now and then to enthusiasm—so true they were and pregnant, 
so full often of a natural magic of exj^ression. On the other 
hand, when he quoted a very well-known line of Shelley’s she 
asked him where it came from. She seemed to him deeper 
and simpler at every moment ; her very limitations of sym¬ 
pathy and knowledge, and they were evidently many, began to 
attract him. The thought of her ancestry crossed him now 
then, rousing in him now wonder, and now a strange sense of 
congruity and harmony. Clearly she was the daughter of a 
primitive unexhausted race. And yet what purity, what re¬ 
finement, what delicate perception and self-restraint ! 

Presently they fell on the subject of Oxford. 

“ Were you ever there ? ” he asked her. 

“ Once,” she said. “ I went with my father one summer 
term. I have only a confused memory of it—of the quad¬ 
rangles, and a long street, a great building with a dome, and 
such beautiful trees ! ” 

‘‘ Did your father often go back ? ” 

“ No : never toward the latter part of his life ”—and her 
clear eyes clouded a little ; “ nothing made him so sad as the 
thought of Oxford.” 

She paused, as though she had strayed on to a topic where 
expression was a little difficult. Tlien his face and clerical 
dress seemed somehow to reassure her, and she began again, 
thougli reluctantly. 

“ lie used to say that it was all so changed. The young fel¬ 
lows he saw when he went back scorned everything he cared 
for. Every visit to Oxford was like a stab to him. It seemed 
to him as if the place was full of men who only wanted to de¬ 
stroy and break down everything that was sacred to him.” 

Elsmere reflected that Richard Leyburn must have left Ox¬ 
ford about the beginning of the Liberal reaction, which fol¬ 
lowed Tractarianism, and in twenty years transformed the 
University. 

Ah ! ” he said smiling, gently. “ He should have lived a 
little longer. There is another turn of the tide since then. 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


43 


The destructive wave has spent itself, and at Oxford now 
man^^ of us feel ourselves on the upward swell of a religious 
revival.” 

Catharine looked up at him with a sweet sympathetic look. 
That dim vision of Oxford, with its gray, tree-lined walls, lay 
very near to her heart for her father’s sake. And the keen 
face above her seemed to satisfy and respond to her inner 
feeling. 

“ I know the High Church influence is very strong,” she 
said, hesitating ; “ but I don’t know whether father would 
have liked that much better.” 

The last words had slipped out of her, and she checked her¬ 
self suddenly. Robert saw that she was uncertain as to his 
opinions, and afraid lest she might have said something dis¬ 
courteous. 

“ It is not only the High Church influence,” he said quickly, 
“ it is a mixture of influences from all sorts of quarters that 
has brought about the new state of things. Some of the fac¬ 
tors in the change were hardly Christians at all, by name, but 
they have all helped to make men think, to stir their hearts, to 
win them back to the old ways.” 

His voice had taken to itself a singular magnetism. Evi¬ 
dently the matters they were discussing were matters in 
which he felt a deep and loving interest. His young, boyish 
face had grown grave ; there was a striking dignity and 
weight in his look and manner, which suddenly roused in 
Catherine the sense that she was speaking to a man of distinc¬ 
tion, accustomed to deal on equal terms with the large things 
of life. She raised her eyes to him for a moment, and he saw 
in them a beautiful, mystical light—responsive, lofty, full of 
soul. 

The next moment, it apparently struck her sharply that 
their conversation was becoming incongruoiis with its sur¬ 
roundings. Behind them Mrs. Thornburgh was bustling about 
with candles and music-stools, preparing for a performance on 
the flute by Mr. Mayhew, the black-browed vicar of Shan- 
moor, and the room seemed to be pervaded by Mrs. Seaton’s 
strident voice. Her strong natural reserve asserted itself, and 
her face settled again into the slight rigidity of expression 
characteristic of it. She rose and prepared to move further 
into the room. 

“ We must listen,” she said to him, smiling, over her 
shoulder. 

And she left him, settling herself by the side of Mrs. Ley- 
burn. He had a momentary sense of rebuff. The man, 


44 


ROBERT ELSMERE, 


quick, sensitive, sympathetic, felt in the woman the presence 
of a strength, a self-sufticingness which was not all attractive. 
His vanity, if he had cherished any during their conversation, 
was not flattered by its close. But as he leaned against the 
window-frame waiting for the music to begin, he could hardly 
keep liiseyes from her. He was a man who, by force of tem¬ 
perament, made friends readily witli women, though except 
for a passing fancy or two he had never been in love ; and his 
sense of difficulty with regard to this stiffly mannered, deep¬ 
eyed country girl brought with it an unusual stimulus and ex¬ 
citement. 

Miss Barks seated herself deliberately, after much fiddling 
with bracelets and gloves, and tied back the onds of her cap 
behind her. Mr. Mayhew took out his flute and lovingly put 
it together. He was a powerful, swarthy man, who said little 
and was generally alarming to the ladies of the neighborhood. 
To propitiate him, they asked him to bring his flute, and 
nervously praised the fierce music he made on it. Miss Barks 
enjoyed a monopoly of his accompaniments, and there were 
many who regarded her assiduity as a covert attack upon the 
widower’s name and position. If so, it was Greek meeting 
Greek, for with all his taciturnity the vicar of Shanmoor was 
well able to defend himself. 

“ Has it begun ? ” said a hurried whisper at Elsmere’s 
elbow, and turning he saw Rose and Agnes on the step of the 
window, Rose’s cheek flushed by the night breeze, a shawl 
thrown lightly round her head. 

She was answered by the first notes of the flute, following 
some powerful chords in which Miss Barks had tested at once 
the strength of her wrists and the vicarage piano. 

The girl made a little of disgust, and turned as though 
to fly down the steps again. But Agnes caught her and held 
her, and the mutinous creature had to submit to be drawn in¬ 
side while Mrs. Thornburgh, in obedience to complaints of 
draughts from Mrs. Seaton, motioned to have the window shut. 
Rose established herself against the wall, her curly head 
thrown back, her eyes half shut, her mouth expressing an 
angry endurance. Robert watched her with amusement. 

It was certainly a remarkable duet. After an adagio open¬ 
ing in which flute and piano were at magnificent cross pur¬ 
poses from the beginning, the two instruments plunged into an 
allegro very long and very fast, which became ultimately a 
desperate race between the compet ing performers for the final 
chord. Mr. MayhcAV toiled away, taxing the resources of his 
whole vast frame to keep his small instrum-ent in a line with 


ROBEET ELSMEUE. 


45 


the piano, and taxing them in vain. For the shriller and the 
wilder grew the flute, and the greater exertion of the dark 
Hercules performing on it, the fiercer grew the pace of the 
piano. Rose stamped her little foot. 

“ Two bars ahead last page,” she murmured, “ three bars 
this : will no one stop her ! ” 

But the pages flew past, turned assiduously by Agnes, who 
took a sardonic delight in these pei'formances, and every 
countenance in the room seemed to take a look of sharpened 
anxiety as to how the duet was to end, and who was to be 
victor. 

Nobody knowing Miss Barks need to have been in any 
doubt as to that ! Crash, came the last chord, and the poor 
flute, nearly half a page behind, was left shrilly hanging in 
mid-air, forsaken and companionless, an object of derision to 
gods and men. 

‘‘ Ah ! I took it a little fast ! ” said the lady, triumphantly 
looking up at the discomfited clergyman. 

“ Mr. Elsmere,” said Rose, hiding herself in the window- 
curtain beside him, that she might have her laugh in safety. 
‘‘ Do they play like that in Oxford, or has Long Whindale a 
monopoly ? ” 

But before he could answer, Mrs. Thornburgh called to the 
girl : 

“ Rose ! Rose ! Don’t go cut again ! ” It is your turn 
next ! ” 

Rose advanced reluctantly, her head in air. Robert, re¬ 
membering something that Mrs. Thornburgh had said to him 
as to her musical power, supposed that she felt it an indignity 
to be a.sked to play in such compan5^ 

Mrs. Thornburgh motioned to him to come and sit by Mrs. 
Leyburn, a summons which he obeyed with the more alacrity, 
as it brought him once more within reach of Mrs. Leyburn’s 
eldest daughter. 

“ Are you fond of music, Mr. Elsmere ? ” asked Mrs. Leyburn 
in her little mincing voice, making room for his chair beside 
them. “ If you are, I am sure my youngest daughter’s play¬ 
ing will please you.” 

Catherine moved abruptly. Robert, while he made some 
pleasant answer, divined that tbe reserved and stately 
daugliter must be often troubled by the motlier’s expansiveness. 

Meanwhile the room was again settling itself to listen. 
Mrs. Seaton was severely turning over a })hotograph book. In 
her opinion the violin was an unbecoming instrument for 
young women. Miss Barks sat upright with the studiously 


46 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


neutral expression which befits the artist asked to listen to a 
rival. Mr. Thornburgh sat pensive, one foot dropped over the 
other. He was very fond of the Leyburn girls, but music 
seemed to him, good man, one of the least comprehensible of 
human pleasures. As for Rose she had at last arranged her¬ 
self and her accompanist Agnes, after routing out from her 
music a couple of Femtasie Stucke, which she had wickedly 
chosen as presenting the most severe classical contrast to the 
“ rubbish ” played by the preceding performers. She stood 
with her lithe figure in its old-fashioned dress thrown out 
against the black coats of a group of gentlemen beyond, one 
slim arched foot advanced, the ends of the blue sash dangling, 
the hand and arm, beautifully formed, but still wanting the 
roundness of womanhood, raised high iFor action, the lightly 
poised head thrown back with an air. Robert thought her a 
bewitching, half-grown thing, overflowing with potentialities 
of future brillance and empire. 

Her music astonished him. Where had a little provincial 
maiden learned to play with this intelligence, this force, this 
delicate command of her instrument ? He was not a musician, 
and therefore could not gauge her exactly, but he was more or 
less familiar with music and its standards, as all people become 
nowadays who live in a highly cultivated society, and he knew 
enough at any rate to see that what he was listening to was 
remarkable, was out of the common range. Still more evi¬ 
dent was this, when from the humorous piece with which the 
sisters led off—a dance of clowns, but clowns of Arcady—they 
slid into a delicate, rippling chant d'amour^ the long drawn 
notes of the violin rising and falling on the piano accompani¬ 
ment with an exquisite plaintiveness. Where did a 
unformed, inexperienced, win the secret of so much eloquence 
—only from the natural dreams of a girl’s heart as to ‘‘ the 
lovers waiting in the hidden years ” ? 

But when the music ceased, Elsmere, after a hearty clap 
that set the room applauding likewise, turned not to the musi¬ 
cian but the figure beside Mrs. Leyburn, the sister who had 
sat listening with an impassiveness, a sort of gentle remote¬ 
ness of look, which had piqued his curiosity. The mother 
meanwhile was drinking in the compliments of Dr. Baker. 

“ Excellent! ” cried Elsmere. “ How in the name of fortune, 
Miss. Leyburn, if I may ask, has your sister managed to get 
on so far in this remote place ? ” 

“ She goes to Manchester every year to some relations we 
have there,” said Catherine quietly; I believe she has 
been very well taught.” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


4:1 


‘‘But surely,” he said warmly, “it is more than teaching— 
more even than talent—there is something like genius in it.” 

She did not answer very readily. 

“ I don’t know,” she said at last. “ Every one says it is 
very good.” 

He would have been repelled her irresponsiveness but that 
her last words had in them a note of lingering, of wistfulness, 
as thought the subject were connected with an inner debate 
not yet solved which troubled her. He was puzzled, but 
certainly not repelled. 

Twenty minutes later everybody was going. The Seatons 
went first, and the other guests lingered awhile afterward to 
enjoy the sense of freedom left by their departure. But at 
last the Mayhews, father and son, set off on foot to walk home 
over the moonlighted mountains ; the doctor tucked himself 
and his daughter into his high gig, and drove off with a 
sweeping, ironical bow to Rose, who had stood on the steps 
teasing him to the last ; and Robert Elsmere offered to escort 
the Misses Leyburn and their mother home. 

Mrs. Thornburgh was left protesting to the vicar’s incredu¬ 
lous ears that never—never as long as she lived—would she 
have Mrs. Seaton inside her doors again. 

“ Her manners ”—cried the vicar’s wife, fuming—“ her 
manners would disgrace a Whinborough shop-girl. She has 
none—positively none ! ” 

Then suddenly her round, comfortable face brightened and 
broadened out into a beaming smile : 

“ But, after all, William, say what you will—and you always 
do say the most unpleasant things you can think of—it was a 
great success. I know the Leyburns enjoyed it. And as for 
Robert, I saw him looking—looking at that little minx Rose 
while she was playing as if he couldn’t take his eyes off her. 
What a picture she made, to be sure ! ” 

The vicar, who had been standing with his back to the fire¬ 
place and his hands in his pockets, received his wife’s remarks 
first of all with lifted eyebrows, and then with a low chuckle, 
half scornful, half compassionate, which made her start in her 
chair. 

“ Rose ? ” he said, impatiently. “ Rose, my dear, where 
were your eyes ? ” 

It was very rarely indeed that on her own ground, so to 
speak, the vicar ventured to take the whip-hand of her like 
this. Mrs. Thornburgh looked at him in amazement. 

“ Do you mean to say,” he asked, in raised tones, “ that 
you didn’t notice that from the moment you first introduced 


48 


.BOBERT ELSMERE. 


Robert to Catherine Leyburn, he had practically no atten¬ 
tion for anybody else ? ” 

Mrs. Thornburgh gazed at him—her memory flew back 
over the evening—and her impulsive contradiction died on 
her lips. It was now her turn to ejaculate : 

“Catherine?” she said feebly; “Catherine? how ab¬ 
surd ? ” But she turned, and, with quickened breath, looked 
out of the window after the retreating figures. Mrs. Thorn¬ 
burgh went up to bed that night an inch taller. She had 
never felt herself more exquisitely indispensable, more of a 
personage. 

CHAPTER IV. 

Before, however, we go on to chronicle the ultimate suc¬ 
cess or failure of Mrs. Thornburgh as a match-maker, it may 
be well to inquire a little more closely into the antecedents 
of the man who had suddenly roused so much activity in her 
contriving mind. And, indeed, these antecedents are impor¬ 
tant to us. For the interest of an uncomplicated story will 
entirely depend upon the clearness with which the reader 
may have grasped the general outlines of a quick soul’s 
development. And this development had already made con¬ 
siderable progress before Mrs. Thornburgh set eyes upon her 
husband’s cousin, Robert Elsmere. 

Robert Elsmere, then, was well born and fairly well pro¬ 
vided with this world’s goods ; up to a certain moderate 
point, indeed, a favorite of fortune in all respects. His 
father belonged to the younger line of an old Sussex family, 
and owed his pleasant country living to the family instincts 
of his uncle. Sir William Elsmere, in whom Whig doctrines 
and Conservative traditions were pretty evenly mixed, with a 
result of the usual respectable and inconspicuous kind. His 
virtues had descended mostly to his daughters, while all Ids 
various weaknesses and fatuities had blossomed into vices in 
the person of his eldest son and heir, the Sir Mowbray Els-)' 
mere of Mrs. Seaton’s early recollections. 

Edward Elsmere, rector of Mure well in Surrey, and father 
of Robert, had died before his uncle and patron ; and his 
widow and son had been left to face the world together. 
Sir William Elsmere and his nephew’s wife had not much in 
common, and rarely concerned themselves with each other. 
Mrs. Elsmere was an Irish woman by birth, with irregular 
Irish ways, and a passion for strange garments, which made 
her the dread of the conventional English squire ; and, after 
she left the vicarage with her son, she and her husband’s 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


49 


uncle met no more. But when he died it was found that the 
old man’s sense of kinship, acting blindly and irrationally, 
but with a slow inevitableness and certainty, had stirred in 
him at the last in behalf of his great-nephew. He left him a 
money legacy, the interest of which was to be administered 
by his mother till his majority, and in a letter addressed to 
his heir he directed that, should the boy on attaining man¬ 
hood show any disposition to enter the Church, all possible 
steps were to be taken to endow him with the family living 
of Murewell, which had been his father’s, and which at the 
time of the old baronet’s death was occupied by another 
connection of the family, already well stricken in years. 

Mowbray Elsmere had been hardly on speaking terms with 
his cousin Edward, and was neither amiable nor generous, 
but his father knew that the tenacious Elsmere instinct was 
to be depended on for the fulfillment of his wishes. And so 
it proved. No sooner was his father dead than Sir Mowbray 
curtly communicated his instructions to Mrs. Elsmere, then 
living at the town of Harden for the sake of the great public 
school recently transported there. She was to inform him, 
when the right moment arrived, if it was the boy’s wish to 
enter the Church, and meanwhile he referred her to his 
lawyers for particulars of such immediate benefits as were 
secured to her under the late baronet’s will. 

At the moment when Sir Mowbray’s letter reached her, 
Mrs. Elsmere was playing a leading part in the small society 
to which circumstances had consigned her. She was the 
personal friend of half the masters and their wives, and of at 
least a quarter of the school, while in the little town which 
stretched up the hill covered by the new school buildings, she 
was the helper, gossip, and confidante of half the parish. Her 
vasthats, strange in fashion and inordinate in brim, her shawls 
of many colors, hitched now to this side now to that, her sway¬ 
ing gait and looped-up skirts, her spectacles, and the dangling 
parcels in which her soul delighted, were the outward signs 
of a personality familiar to all. For under those checked 
shawls, which few women passed without an inward marvel, 
there beat one of the warmest hearts that ever animated 
mortal clay, and the prematurely wrinkled face, with its small, 
quick eyes and shrewd, indulgent mouth, bespoke a nature 
as responsive as it was vigorous. 

Their owner was constantly in the public eye. Her house, 
during the hours at any rate in which her boy was at school, 
was little else than a halting-place betAveen two journeys. 
Visits to the poor, long watches by the sick ; committees, in 


50 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


which her racy breadth of character gave her always an im¬ 
portant place ; discussions with the vicar, arguments with 
the curates, a chat with this person and a walk with that— 
these were the incidents and occupations which filled her day. 
Life was delightful to her ; action, energy, influence, were 
delightful to her ; she could only breathe freely in the very 
thick of the stirring, many-colored tumult of existence. 
Whether it was a pauper in the work-house, or boys from the 
school, or a girl caught in the tangle of a love affair, it was 
all the same to Mrs. Elsmere. Everything moved her, every¬ 
thing appealed to her. Her life was a perpetual giving forth, 
and such was the inherent nobility and soundness of the 
nature, that in spite of her curious Irish fondness for the 
vehement romantic sides of experience, she did little, harm 
and much good. Her tongue might be over-ready and her 
championships indiscreet, but her hands were helpful and her 
heart was true. There was something contagious in her 
enjoyment of life, and with all her strong religious faith, the 
thought of death, of any final pause and silence in the whir 
of the great social machine, was to her a thought of greater 
chill and horror than to many a less brave and spiritual soul. 

Till her boy was twelve years old, however, she had lived 
for him first and foremost. She had taught him, played with 
him, learned with him, communicating to him through all his 
lessons her own fire and eagerness to a degree which every 
now and then taxed the physical powers of the child. 
Whenever the signs of strain appeared, however, the mother 
would be overtaken by a fit of repentant watchfulness, and 
for days together Robert would find her the most fascinating 
plaj-mate, story-teller, and romp, and forget all his precocious 
interest in histoiy or vulgar fractions. In after-years when 
Robert looked back upon his childhood, he was often reminded 
of the stories of Goethe’s bringing-up. He could recall 
exactly the same scenes as Goethe describes—mother and 
child sitting together in the gloaming, the mother’s dark 
eyes dancing with fun or kindling with dramatic fire, as she 
carried an imaginary hero or heroine through a series of the 
raciest adventures ; the child all eagerness and sjmipathy, 
now clapping his little* hands at the fall of the giant, or the 
defeat of the sorcerer, and now arguing and suggesting in 
ways which gave perpetually fresh stimulus to the mother’s 
inventiveness. He could see her dressing up with him on 
Avet days, reciting King Henry to his Prince Hal, or Prospero 
to his Ariel, or simply giving free vent to her own exuberant 
Irish fun till both he and she would sink exhausted into each 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 


51 


other’s arms, and end the evening with a long croon, sitting 
curled up together in a big arm-chair in front of the fire. 
He could see himself as a child of many crazes, eager for 
poetry one week, for natural history the next, now spending 
all his spare time in strumming, now in drawing, and now 
forgetting everything but the delights of tree-climbing and 
bird-nesting. 

And through it all he had the quick memory of his mother’s 
companionship ; he could recall her rueful looks whenever the 
eager, inaccurate ways, in which he reflected certain ineradic¬ 
able tendencies of her own, had lost him a school advantage ; 
he could remember her exhortations, with the dash in them 
of humorous self-reproach which made them so stirring to the 
child’s affection ; and he could realize their old far-off life at 
Murewell, the joys and the worries of it, and see her now 
gossiping with the village folk, now wearing herself impetu¬ 
ously to death in their service, and now roaming with him 
over the Surrey heaths in search of all the dirty, delectable 
things in which a boy-naturalist delights. And through it 
all he was conscious of the same vivid, energetic creature, 
disposing with some difiiculty fracas of its own excess of 
nervous life. 

To return, however, to this same critical moment of Sir 
Mowbray’s offer. Robert at the time was a boy of sixteen, 
doing very well at school, a favorite both with boys and 
masters. But as to whether his development would lead 
him in the direction of taking Orders, his mother had not the 
slightest idea. She was not herself very much tempted by 
the prospect. There were recollections connected with Mure¬ 
well, and with the long death in life which her husband had 
passed through there, which were deeply painful to her ; and, 
moreover, her sympathy with the clergy as a class was by no 
means strong. Her experience had not been large, but the 
feeling based on it promised to have all the tenacity of a 
favorite prejudice. Fortune had lianded over the parish of 
Harden to a ritualist vicar. Mrs. Elsmere’s inlierited Evan¬ 
gelicalism—she came from an Ulster county—rebelled against 
liis doctrine, but the man himself was too lovable to be dis¬ 
liked. Mrs. Elsmere knew a hero when she saw him. And 
in his own narrow way, the small-headed, emaciated vicar was 
a hero, and he and Mrs. Elsmere had soon tasted each other’s 
quality, and formed a curious alliance, founded on true simil¬ 
arity, in difference. 

But the criticism thus warded off the vicar expended itself 
with all the more force on his subordinates. The Harden 


52 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


curates were the chief crook in Mrs. Elsmere’s otherwise 
tolerable lot. Her parish activities brought her across them 
perpetually, and she could not away with them. Their 
cassocks, their pretensions, their stupidities, roused the Irish 
woman’s sense of humor at every turn. The individuals came 
and went, hut the type it seemed to her was always the 
same : and she made their peculiarities the basis of a pessi¬ 
mist theory as to the future of the English Church, which 
was a source of constant amusement to the very broad-minded 
young men who filled up the school staff. She, so ready in 
general to see all the world’s good points, was almost blind 
when it was a curate’s virtues which were in question. So 
that, in spite of all her persistent church-going, and her love 
of church performances as an essential part of the busy human 
spectacle, Mrs. Elsmere had no yearning for a clerical son. 
The little accidents of a personal experience had led to wide 
generalizations, as is the way with us mortals, and the posi¬ 
tion of the young parson in these days of increased parsonic 
pretensions was, to Mrs. Elsmere, a position in which there 
was an inherent' risk of absurdity. She wished her son to 
impose upon her when it came to his taking any serious step 
in life. She asked for nothing better, indeed, than to be 
able, when the time came, to how the motherly knee to him 
in homage, and she felt a little dread lest, in her flat moments, 
a clerical son might sometimes rouse in her that sharp sense 
of the ludicrous which is the enemy of all happy illusions. 

Still, of course, the Elsmere proposal was one to be seriously 
considered in its due time and place. Mrs. Elsmere only re¬ 
flected that it would certainly be better to say nothing to it to 
Robert until he should be at college. His impressionable tem¬ 
perament, and the power he had occasional!}^ shown of absorb¬ 
ing himself in a subject till it produced in him a fit of intense, 
continuous brooding, unfavorable to health and nervous energy, 
all warned her not to supply him, at a period of rapid mental 
and bodily growth, with any fresh stimulus to the sense of re¬ 
sponsibility. As a boy, he had always shown himself religiously 
susceptible to a certain extent, and his mother’s religious likes 
and dislikes had invariably found in liim a blind and chivalrous 
support. He was content to be with her, to worship with lier, 
and to feel that no reluctance or resistance divded his heart 
from hers. But there had been nothing specially noteworthy or 
precocious about his religious development, and, at sixteen or 
seventeen, in spite of Ins affectionate compliance and his nat¬ 
ural reverence for all persons and beliefs in authority, his 
mother was perfectly aware that many other things in his life 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


53 


were more real to him than religion. And on this point, at any 
rate, she was certainly not the person to force him. 

He was such a school-hoy as a discerning master delights in— 
keen about everything, bright, docile, popular, excellent at 
games. He was in the sixth, moreover, as soon as his age al¬ 
lowed : that is to say, as soon as he was sixteen ; and his pride 
in everything connected with the great body in which he had 
already a marked and important place was unbounded. Very 
early in his school career the literary instincts, which had al¬ 
ways been present in him, and which his mother had largely 
helped to develop by her own restless, imaginative ways of ap¬ 
proaching life and the world, made themselves felt with con¬ 
siderable force. Some time before his cousin’s letter arrived 
he had been taken with a craze for English poetry, and, but for 
the corrective influence of a favorite tutor, would probably have 
thrown himself into it with the same exclusive passion as he 
had shown for subject after subject in his eager, ebullient child¬ 
hood. His mother found him at thirteen indicting a letter on 
the subject of ‘‘ The Faerie Queene ” to a school friend, in 
which, with a sincerity which made her forgive the pomposity, 
he remarked : 

“ I can truly say, with Pope, that this great work has af¬ 
forded me extraordinary pleasure.” 

And about the same time, a master who was much interest¬ 
ed in the boy’s prospects of getting the school prize for Latin 
verse, a subject for which he had always shown a special apti¬ 
tude, asked him anxiously, after an Easter holiday, what he had 
been reading ; the boy ran his hands through liis hair, and still 
keeping his finger between the leaves, shut a book before him 
from which he had been learning bj^ heart, and which was, alas ! 
neither Ovid nor Virgil. 

“ I have just finished Belial ! ” he said, with a sigh of satis¬ 
faction, “ and am beginning Beelzebub.” 

A craze of this kind was naturally followed by a feverish 
period of juvenile authorship, when the liouse was littered over 
with stanzas from the opening canto of a great poem on Colum¬ 
bus, or with moral essays in the manner of Pope, castigating 
the vices of the time with an energj^ which sorely tried the grav¬ 
ity of the mother whenever she was called upon, as she invari¬ 
ably was, to play audience to the young poet. At the same 
time the classics absorbed in reality their full share of this fast- 
developing power. Virgil and ^schylus appealed to the same 
fibers, the same susceptibilities, as Milton and Shakespeare, 
and the boy’s quick, imaginative sense appropriated Greek and 
Latin life with the same ease which it showed in possessing it- 


54 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


self of that by-gone English life whence sprung the “ Canter¬ 
bury Tales,” or “ As You Like It.” So that his tutor, who was 
much attached to him, and who made it one of his main or)jects. 
in life to keep the boy’s aspiring nose to the grindstone of gram¬ 
matical minutiw, began about the time of Sir Mowbray’s letter 
to prophesy very smooth things indeed to his mother as to his 
future success at college, the possibility of his getting the fa¬ 
mous St. Anselm’s scholarship, and so on. 

Evidently such a youth was not likely to depend for the at¬ 
tainment of a foothold in life on a piece of family privilege.-^ 
The world was all before him where to choose, Mrs. Elsmere 
thought proudly to herself, as her mother’s fancy wandered 
rashly through the coming years. And for many reasons she 
secretly allowed herself to hope that he would find for himself 
some other post of ministry in a very various world than the 
vicarage of Mure well. 

So she wrote a civil letter of acknowledgment to Sir Mow¬ 
bray, informing him that the intentions of his great-uncle 
should be communicated to the boy when lie should be of fit age 
to consider them, and that meanwhile she was obliged to him 
for pointing out the procedure by which she might lay hands 
on the legacy bequeathed to her in trust for her son, the income 
of which would now be doubly welcome in view of his college 
expenses. There the matter rested, and Mrs. Elsmere, during 
the two years which followed, thought little more about it. She 
became more and more absorbed in her boy’s immediate pros¬ 
pects, in the care of his health, which was uneven and tried 
somewhat by the strain of preparation for an attempt upon the 
St. Anselm’s scholarship, and in the demands which his ardent 
nature, oppressed with the weight of its own aspirations, was 
constantly making upon her support and sympathy. 

At last the moment so long expected arrived. Mrs. Elsmere 
and her son left Harden amid a chorus of good wishes, and set¬ 
tled themselves early in November in Oxford lodgings. Robert 
was to have a few days’ complete holiday before the examina^ 
tion, and he and his mother spent it in exploring the beautiful 
old town, now shrouded in the “ pensive glooms ” of still, gray 
autumn weather. There was no sun to light up the misty 
reaches of the river ; the trees in the Broad AValk were almost 
bare ; the Virginian creeper no longer shone in patches of deli¬ 
cate crimson on the college walls ; the gardens were damp and 
forsaken. But to Mrs. Elsmere and Robert the place needed 
neither sun nor summer “ for beauty’s heightening.” On both 
of them it laid its old irresistible spell ; the sentiment haunting 
its quadrangles, its libraries, and its dim melodious chapels, 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 


55 


Stole into the lad’s heart and alternately soothed and stimulated 
that keen individual consciousness which naturally accompa¬ 
nies the first entrance into manhood. Here, on this soil steeped 
in memories, his problems, his struggles were to be fought out 
in their turn. “ Take up thy manliood,” said the inward voice, 
“ and show what is in thee. The hour and the opportunity 
have come ! ” 

And to this thrill of vague expectation, this young sense of 
an expanding world, something of pathos and of sacredness was 
added by the dumb influences of the old streets and weather¬ 
beaten stones. How tenacious they were of the past ! The 
dreaming city seemed to be still brooding in the autumn calm 
over the long succession of her sons. The continuity, the com¬ 
plexity of human experience ; the unremitting effort of the 
race ; the stream of purpose running through it all—these were 
the kind of thoughts which, in more or less inchoate and frag¬ 
mentary shape, pervaded the boy’s sensitive mind as he ram¬ 
bled with his mother from college to college. 

Mrs. Elsmere, too, was fascinated by Oxford. But for all her 
eager interest, the historic beauty of the place aroused in her 
an under-mood of melancholy, just as it did in Robert. Both 
had the impressionable Celtic temperament, and both felt that 
a critical moment was upon them, and that the Oxford air was 
charged with fate for each of tliem. For the first time in 
their lives they were parted. The mother’s long guardianship 
was coming to an end. Had she loved him enough ? Had she 
so far fulfilled the trust her dead husband had imposed upon 
her? Would her boy love her in the new life as he had loved 
her in the old ? And could her poor, craven heart bear to see 
him absorbed by fresh interests and passions, in which her 
share could be only, at the best, secondary and indirect ? 

One day—it was on the afternoon preceding the examina¬ 
tion—she gave hurried, half-laughing utterance to some of these 
misgivings of hers. They were walking down the Lime Walk 
of Trinity Gardens ; beneath their feet a yellow, fresh-strewn 
carpet of leaves, brown, interlacing branches overhead, and a 
red, misty sun shining through the trunks. Robert understood 
his mother perfectly, and the way she had of hiding a storm of 
feeling under these tremulous comedy airs. So that, instead 
of laughing too, he took her hand, and, there being no specta¬ 
tors anywhei’e to be seen in the damp November garden, he 
raised it to. his lips with a few broken words of affection and 
gratitude which very nearly overcame the self-command of 
both of them. She dashed wildly into another subject, and 
then suddenly it occurred to her impulsive mind that the mo- 


56 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


ment had come to make him acquainted with those dying 
intentions of his great-uncle which we have already described. 
The diversion was a welcome one, and the duty seemed clear. 
So, accordingly, she made him give her all his attention while 
she told him the story and the terms of Sir Mowbray’s letter, 
forcing herself the while to keep her opinions and predilections 
as much as possible out of sight. 

Robert listened with interest and astonishment, the sense 
of a new-found manhood waxing once more strong within 
him, as his mind admitted the strange picture of himself oc¬ 
cupying the place which had been his father’s ; master of the 
house and the parish he had wandered over with childish 
steps, clinging to the finger or the coat of the tall, stooping 
figure which occupied the dim background of his recollections. 
“ Poor mother,” he said, thoughtfully, when she paused, “ it 
would be hard upon you to go back to Murewell ! ” 

“ Oh, you mustn’t think of me when the time comes,” said 
Mrs. Elsmere, sighing. “ I shall be a tiresome old woman, 
and you will be a young man wanting a wife. There, put it 
out of your head, Robert. I thought I had better tell you, 
for, after all, the fact may concern your Oxford life. But 
you’ve got a long time yet before you need begin to worry 
about it.” 

The boy drew himself up to his full height, and tossed his 
tumbling reddish hair back from his eyes. He Avas nearly 
six feet already, with a long, thin body and head, which amply 
justified his school nickname of the darning-needle.” 

“ Don’t you trouble either, mother,” he said, with a tone of 
decision ; “ I don’t feel as if I should ever take Orders.” 

Mrs. Elsmere was old enough to know what importance to 
attach to the trenchancy of eighteen, but still the Avords Avere 
pleasant to her. 

The next day Robert went up for examination, and after 
three days of hard work, and phases of alternate hope and 
depression, in which mother and son excited one another to 
no useful purpose, there came the anxious croAvding round 
the college gate in the November tAvilight, and the sudden 
flight of dispersing messengers bearing the news over Ox¬ 
ford. The scholarship had been Avon by a precocious Eton¬ 
ian Avith an extraordinary talent for “ stems,” and all that 
appertaineth thereto. But the exhibition fell to Robert, and 
mother and son Avere Avell content. 

The boy Avas eager to come into residence at once, though 
he would matriculate too late to keep the term. Tlie college 
authorities Avere willing, and on the Saturday folloAving the 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


57 


announcement of his success he was matriculated, saw the 
provost, and Avas informed that rooms would be found for 
him without delay. His mother and he gayly climbed innu¬ 
merable stairs to inspect the garrets of which he was soon to 
take proud possession, sallying forth from them only to enjoy 
an agitated delightful afternoon among the shops. Expen¬ 
diture, always charming, becomes under these circumstances 
a sacred and pontifical act. Hever had Mrs. Elsmere bought 
a tea-pot for herself with half the fervor which she now 
threw into the purchase of Robert’s ; and the young man, 
accustomed to a rather bare home, and an Irish lack of the 
little elegances of life, was overwhelmed when his mother 
actually dragged liim into a print-seller’s, and added an en¬ 
graving or two to the enticing miscellaneous mass of Avhich 
he was already master. 

They only just left themselves time to rush back to their 
lodgings and dress for the solemn function of a dinner with 
the provost. The dinner, however, was a great success. The 
short, shy manner of their white-haired host thawed under 
the influence of Mrs. Elsmere’s racy, unaffected ways, and it 
was not long before everybody in the room had more or less 
made friends Avith her, and forgiven her her marvelous drab 
poplin, adorned with fresh pink ruchings for the occasion. 
As for the provost, Mrs. Elsmere had been told that he Avas a 
person of Avhom she must inevitably stand in awe. But all 
her life long she had been like the youth in the fairy tale who 
desired to learn how to shiver and could not attain unto it. 
Fate had denied her the capacity of standing in aAA^e of any¬ 
body, and she rushed at her host as a new type, delighting in 
the thrill Avhich she felt creeping over her when she found 
herself on the arm of one who had been the rallying-point of 
a hundred struggles, and a center of influence over thousands 
of English lives. 

And then followed the proud moment when Robert, in his 
exhibitioner’s gOAvn, took her to service in the chapel on Sun¬ 
day. The scores of young faces, the full unison of the hymns, 
and finally the provost’s sermon, AAuth its strange brusqueries 
and simplicities of manner and phrase—simplicities so sug¬ 
gestive, so full of a rich and yet disciplined experience that 
tliey haunted her mind for weeks afterward—completed the 
general impression made upon her by the Oxford life. She 
came out, tremulous and shaken, leaning on her son’s arm. 
She, too, like the generations before her, had launched her 
venture into the deep. Her boy Avas putting out from her 
into the ocean, henceforth she could but watch liim from the 


58 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


shore. Brought into contact with this imposing university 
organization, with all its suggestions of virile energies and 
functions, the mother suddenly felt herself insignilicant and 
forsaken. He had been her all, her own, and now, on this 
training-ground of English youth, it seemed to her that the 
great human society had claimed him from her. 

CHAPTER V. 

In his Oxford life Robert surrendered himself to the best 
and most stimulating influences of the place, just as he had 
done at school. He was a youth of many friends, by virtue 
of a natural gift of sympathy, which was no doubt often 
abused, and by no means invariably profitable to its owner, 
but wherein, at any rate, his power over his fellows, like the 
power of half the potent men in the world’s history, always 
lay rooted. He had his mother’s delight in living. He loved 
the cricket-field, he loved the river ; his athletic instincts and 
his athletic friends were always fighting in him with his lit¬ 
erary instincts and the friends who appealed primariljr to the 
intellectual and moral side of him. He made many mistakes 
alike in friends and in pursuits ; in the freshness of a young 
and roving curiosity he had great difficulty in submitting 
himself to the intellectual routine of the university, a diffi¬ 
culty which ultimately cost htm much ; but at the bottom of 
the lad, all the time, there was a strength of will, a force and 
even tyranny of conscience, which kept his charm and pliancy 
from degenerating into weakness, and made it not only de¬ 
lightful, but profitable to love him. He knew that his mother 
was bound up in him, and his being was set to satisfy, so far 
as he could, all her honorable ambitions. 

His many undergraduate friends, strong as their influence 
must have been in the aggregate on a nature so receptive, 
hardly concern us here. His future life, so far as we can see, 
was most noticeably affected by two men older than himself, 
and belonging to the dons—both of them fellows and tutors 
of St. Anselm’s, though on different planes of age. 

The first one, Edward Langham, was Robert’s tutor, and 
about seven years older than himself. He was a man about 
whom, on entering the college, Robert heard more than the 
usual crop of stories. The healthy young English barbarian 
has an aversion to the intrusion of more manner into life than 
is absolutely necessary. Now, Langham was overburdened 
with manner, though it was manner of the depreciating and 
not of the arrogant order. Decisions, it seemed, of all sorts 
were abominable to him. To help a friend he had once con- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


59 


sented to be pro-proctor. He resigned in a month, and none 
of his acquaintances ever afterward dared to allude to the ex¬ 
perience. If you could have got at his inmost mind, it was 
affirmed, the persons most obnoxious there would have been 
found to be the scout, who intrusively asked him every morn¬ 
ing what he would have for breakfast, and the college cook, 
who, till such a course w^as strictly forbidden him, mounted 
to his room at half-past nine to inquire whether he would 
“ dine in.” •Being a scholar of considerable eminence, it 
pleased him to assume on all questions an exasperating degree 
of ignorance ; and the wags of the college averred that when 
asked if it rained, or if collections took place on such and 
such a day, it was pain and grief to him to have to affirm 
positively, without qualifications, that so it was. 

Such a man was not very likely, one would have thought, 
to captivate an ardent, impulsive boy like Elsmere. Edward 
Langham, however, notwithstanding undergraduate tales, 
was a very remarkable person. In the first place he was pos¬ 
sessed of exceptional personal beauty. His coloring w^as viv¬ 
idly black and white, closely curling jet-black hair, and fine 
black eyes contrasting with a pale, clear complexion and even, 
white teeth. So far he had the characteristics which certain 
Irishmen share with most Spaniards. But the Celtic or Iber¬ 
ian brilliance was balanced by a classical delicacy and pre¬ 
cision of feature. He had the brow, the nose, the upper lip, 
the finely molded chin, which belong to the more severe and 
spiritual Greek type. Certainly of Greek blitheness and 
directness there was no trace. The eye was wavering and 
profoundly melancholy ; all the movements of the tall, finely 
built frame were hesitating and doubtful. It was as though 
the man were sulfering from paralysis of some moral muscle 
or other ; as if some of the normal springs of action in him 
had been profoundly and permanently weakened. 

He had a curious history. He was the only child of a 
doctor in a Lincolnshire country town. His old parents had 
brought him up in strict provincial ways, ignoring the boy’s 
idiosyncrasies as much as possible. They did not want an 
exceptional and abnormal son, and they tried to put down his 
dreamy, self-conscious habits by forcing him into the common, 
middle-class. Evangelical groove. As soon as he got to 
college, however, the brooding, gifted nature had a moment 
of sudden and, as it seemed to the old people in Gainsborough, 
most reprehensible expansion. Poems were sent to them, cut 
out of one or the other of the leading periodicals, with their 
son’s initials appended, and articles of philosophical art- 


60 


BOhmT ELSMETtE. 


criticism, published while the boy was still an under-graduate 
—which seemed to the stem father everthing that was 
sophistical and subversive. For they treated Christianity 
itself as an open question, and showed especially scant re¬ 
spect for the “ Protestantism of the Protestant religion.” 
The father warned him grimly that he was not going to spend 
his hard-earned savings on the support of a free-thinking 
scribbler, and the young man wrote no more till just after he 
had taken a double first in Greats. Then the publication of 
an article in one of the leading reviews on “ The Ideals of 
Modern Culture ” not only brought him a furious letter from 
home stopping all supplies, but also lost him a probable 
fellowship. His college was one of the narrowest and most 
backward in Oxford, and it was made perfectly plain to him 
before the fellowship examination that he would not be 
elected. 

He left the college, took pupils for a while, then stood for 
a vacant fellowship at St. Anselm’s, the Liberal head-quarters, 
and got it with flying colors. 

Thenceforward one would have thought that a brilliant and 
favorable mental development was secured to him. Not at 
all. The moment of his quarrel with his father and his 
college had, in fact, represented a moment of energy, of com¬ 
parative success, which never recurred. It was as though this 
outburst of action and liberty had disappointed him, as if 
some deep-rooted instinct—cold, critical, reflective—had re¬ 
asserted itself, condemning him and his censors equally. 
The uselessness of utterance, the futility of enthusiasm, the 
inaccessibility of the ideal, the practical absurdity of trying 
to realize any of the mind’s inward dreams ; these were the 
kind of considerations which descended upon him, slowly 
and fatally, crushing down the newly springing growths of 
action or of passion. It was as though life had demonstrated 
to him the essential truth of a childish saying of his own 
which had startled and displeased his Calvinist mother years 
before. ‘‘ Mother,” the delicate, large-eyed child had said to 
her one day in a fit of physical weariness, “ how is it I dis¬ 
like the things I dislike so much more than I like the things 
I like ? ” 

So he wrote no more, he quarreled no more, he meddled 
with the great passionate things of life and expression no 
more. On his taking up residence in St. Anselm’s, indeed, 
and on his being appointed first lecturer and then tutor, he 
had a momentary pleasure in the thought of teaching. His 
mind was a storehouse of thought and fact, and to the man 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


61 


brought up at a dull provincial day-school and never allowed 
to associate freely with his kind, the bright lads fresh from 
Eton and Harrow about him were singularly attractive. But 
a few terms were enough to scatter this illusion, too. He 
could not be simple, he could not be spontaneous ; he was 
tormented by self-consciousness, and it was impossible to him 
to talk and behave as those talk and behave who have been 
brought up more or less in the big world from the beginning. 
So this dream, too, faded, for youth asks, above all things, 
simplicity and spontaneity in those who would take posses¬ 
sion of it. His lectures, which were at first brilliant enough 
to attract numbers of men from other colleges, became 
gradually mere dry, ingenious skeletons, without life or feel¬ 
ing. It was possible to learn a great deal from him ; it was 
not possible to catch from him any contagion of that amor 
intellectualis which had flamed at one moment so high 
within him. He ceased to compose ; but as the intellectual 
faculty must have some employment, he became a translator, 
a contributor to dictionaries, a microscopic student of texts, 
not in the interest of anything beyond, but simply as a kind 
of mental stone-breaking. 

The only survival of that moment of glow and color in his 
life was his love of music and the theater. Almost every 
year he disappeared to France to haunt the Paris theaters 
for a fortnight; to Berlin or Bayreuth to drink his fill of 
music. He talked neither of music nor of acting ; he made 
no one sharer of his enjoyment, if he did enjoy. It was 
simply his way of cheating his creative faculty, which, though 
it had grown impotent, was still there, still restless. Alto¬ 
gether a melancholy, pitiable man—at once thorough-going 
sceptic and thorough-going idealist, the victim of that critical 
sense which says No to every impulse, and is always rest¬ 
lessly, and yet hopelessly, seeking the future through the 
neglected and outraged present. 

And yet the man’s instincts, at this period of his life at 
any rate, were habitually kindly and affectionate. He knew 
nothing of women, and was not liked by them, but it was not 
his fault if he made no impression on the youth about him. 
It seemed to him that he was ahvays seeking in their eyes and 
faces for some light of sympathy which was always escaping 
him, and which he was powerless to compel. He met it for 
the first time in Robert Elsmere. The susceptible, poetical 
boy was struck at some favorable moment by that romantic 
side of the ineffective tutor—his silence, his melancholy, his 
personal beauty—which no one else, with perhaps one or two 


62 


BOBERT ELSMERE. 


exceptions among the older men, cared to take into account ; 
or touched perhaps by some note in him, surprised in passing, 
of weariness or shrinking, as compared with the contemptuous 
tone of the college toward him. He showed his liking im 2 )et- 
uously, boyishly, as his way was, and thenceforward during his 
university career Langham became his slave. He had no 
ambition for himself ; his motto might have been that dismal 
one—The small things of life are odious to me, and the habit 
of them enslaves me ; the great things of life are eternally 
attractive to me, and indolence and fear put them by”; but 
for the university chances of this lanky, red-haired j^outh— 
with his eagerness, his boundless curiosit}^, his genius foi all 
sorts of lovable mistakes—he disquieted himself greatly. He 
tridd to discipline the roving mind, to infuse into the boy’s 
literary tem23er the delicacy, the precision, the subtlety of his 
own. His fastidious, critical habits of work supplied exactly 
that antidote which Elsmere’s main faults of haste and care¬ 
lessness required. He was always holding up before him the 
inexhaustible patience and labor involved in all true knowl¬ 
edge ; and it was to the germs of critical judgment so im¬ 
planted in him that Elsmere owed many of the later growths 
of his development—growths with which we have not yet to 
concern ourselves. 

And in return, the tutor allowed himself rarely, very rarely, 
a moment of utterance from the depths of his real self. One 
evening in the summer term following the boy’s matriculation, 
Elsmere brought him an essay after Hall, and they sat on 
talking afterward. It was a rainjq cheerless evening ; the 
first contest of the Boats week had been rowed in cold wind 
and sleet ; a dreary blast whistled through the college. 
Suddenly Langham reached out his hand for an open letter. 
“ I have had an offer, Elsmere,” he said abruptly. 

And he put it into his hand. It was the offer of an im¬ 
portant Scotch professorship, coming from the man most 
influential in assigning it. The last occiq^ant of the post had 
been a scholar of Euroj^ean eminence. Langham’s contribu¬ 
tions to a great foreign review, and certain Oxford recom¬ 
mendations, were the basis of the present overture, which, 
coming from one who was himself a classic of the classics, 
was couched in terms flattering to any oung man’s vanity. 

Robert looked up with a joyful exclamation when he had 
finished the letter. 

“I congratulate you, sir.” 

“ I have refused it,” said Langham abruptly. 

His companion sat open-mouthed. Young as he was, he 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


63 


knew perfectly well that this particular appointment was one 
of the blue ribbons of British scholarship. 

“ Do you think ”—said the other in a tone of singular 
vibration, which had in it a note of almost contemptuous 
irritation—“ do you think I am the man to get and keep a 
hold ou a rampagious class of hundreds of Scotch lads ? Do 
you think 1 am the man to carry on what Reid began—Reid, 
that old fighter, that preacher of all sorts of jubilant 
dogmas ? ” 

He looked at Elsmere under his straight black brows im¬ 
periously. The youth felt the nervous tension in the elder 
mati'S voice and manner, was startled by a confidence never 
before bestowed upon him, close as tliat unequal bond 
between them had been growing during the six months of 
his Oxford life, and plucking up courage hurled at him a 
number of frank, young expostulations, which really put into 
friendly shape all that was being said about Langham in his 
college and in the university. Why was he so self-distrustful, 
so absurdly diffident of responsibility, so bent on hiding his 
great gifts under a bushel ? 

The tutor smiled sadly, and, sitting down, buried his head 
in his hands and said nothing for awhile. Then he looked 
up and stretched out a hand toward a book which lay on a 
table near. It was the ‘‘ Reveries ” of Senancour. “ My 
answer is written liere^'' he said. “ It will seem to you now, 
Elsmere, mere midsummer madness. May it always seem so 
to you. Forgive me. The pressure of solitude sometimes is 
too great.” 

Elsmere looked up with one of his flashing, affectionate 
smiles, and took the book from Langham’s hand. He found 
on the open page a marked passage : 

“ Oh^ swiftly passing seasons of life ! There was a time 
when men seemed to be sincere ; when thought was nourished 
on friendship, kindness, love : when dawn still kept its 
brilliance, and the night its peace. I can, the soul said to 
itself, and I will; I will do all that is right—all that is natural. 
But soon resistance, difficulty, unforeseen, coming we know 
not whence, arrest us, undeceive us, and the human yoke 
grows heavy on our necks. Thenceforward we become merely 
sharers in the common woe. Hemmed in on all sides, we feel 
our faculties only to realize their impotence : we have time 
and strength to do what we mus, never what we will. Men 
go on repeating the words work, genius, success. Fools ! Will 
all these resounding projects, though they enable us to cheat 
ourselves, enable us to cheat the icy fate which rules us and 


64 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


our globe, wandering forsaken through the vast silence of 
the heavens ?” 

Robert looked up startled, the book dropping from his hand. 
The words sent a chill to the heart of one born to hope, to 
will, to crave. 

Suddenly Langham dashed the volume from him, almost 
with violence. 

“ Forget that drivel, Elsmere. It was a crime to show it to 
you. It is not sane ; neither perhaps am I. But I am not 
going to Scotland. They would request me to resign in a 
week.” 

Long after Elsmere who had stayed talking a while on 
other things, had gone, Langham sat on brooding over the 
empty grate. 

“ Corrupter of youth ! ” he said to himself once bitterly. 
And perhaps it was to a certain remorse in the tutor’s tnind 
that Elsmere owed an experience of great importance to his 
after-life. 

The name of a certain Mr. Grey had for some time before 
his entry at Oxford been more or less familiar to Robert’s 
ears as that of a person of great influence and consideration 
at St. Anselm’s. His tutor at Harden had spoken of him in 
the boy’s hearing as one of the most remarkable men of the 
generation, and had several times impressed upon his pupil 
that nothing could be so desirable for him as to secure the 
friendship of such a man. It was on the occasion of his first 
interview with the provost, after the scholarship examination, 
that Robert was first brought face to face with Mr. Grey. 
He could remember a short, dark man standing beside the pro¬ 
vost, who had been introduced to him by that name, but the 
nervausness of the moment had been so great that the boy 
had been quite incapable of giving him any special attention. 

During his first term and a half of residence, Robert occa¬ 
sionally met Mr. Grey in the quadrangle or in the street, and 
the tutor, remembering the thin, bright-faced youth, would 
return his salutations kindly, and sometimes stop to speak to 
him, to ask him if he were comfortably settled in his rooms, 
or make a remark about the boats. But the acquaintance did 
not seem likely to progress, for Mr. Grey was a Greats tutor, 
and Robert naturally had nothing to do with him as far as 
work was concerned. 

However, a day or after the conversation we have de¬ 
scribed, Robert, going to Langham’s • rooms late in the after¬ 
noon to return a book which had been lent to him, perceived 
two figures standing talking on the hearth-rug, and by the 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


6a 


western light beating in recognized the thickset frame and 
broad brow of Mr. Grey. 

“Come in, Elsmere,” said Langham, as he stood hesitating 
on the tlireshold. You have met Mr. Grey before, I think?” 

“We first met at an anxious moment,” said Mr. Grey, smil¬ 
ing and shaking hands with the boy. “ A first interview with 
the provost is always formidable. I remember it too well 
myself. You did very well, I remember, Mr. Elsmere. Well, 
Langham, I must be off. I shall be late for my meeting as it 
is. I think we have settled our business. Good-night.” 

Langham stood for a moment after the door closed, eyeing 
young Elsmere. There was a curious struggle going on in 
the tutor’s mind. 

“ Elsmere,” he said at last, abruptly, “ would you like to go 
to-night and hear Grey preach ? ” 

“ Preach ! ” exclaimed the lad. “ I thought he was a lay¬ 
man.” 

“ So he is. It will be a lay sermon. It was always the 
custom here with the clerical tutors to address their men once 
a term before Communion Sunday, and some years ago, when 
Grey first became tutor, he determined, though he was a lay¬ 
man, to carry on the practice. It was an extraordinary effort, 
for he is a man to whom words on such a subject are the coin¬ 
ing of his heart’s blood, and he has repeated it very rarely. 
It is two years now since his last address.” 

“ Of course I should like to go,” said Robert with eager¬ 
ness.. “ Is it open ? ” 

“ Strictly it is for his Greats pupils, but I can take you in. 
It is hardly meant for freshmen ; but—well, you are far 
enough on to make it interesting to you.” 

“ The lad will take to Grey’s influence like a fish to water,” 
thought the tutor to himself when he was alone, not without 
a strange reluctance. “ Well, no one can say I have not given 
him his opportunity to be ‘earnest.’” 

The sarcasm of the last word was the kind of sarcasm 
which a man of his type in an earlier generation might have 
applied to the “ earnestness ” of an Arnoldian Rugby. 

At eight o’clock that evening Robert found himself cross¬ 
ing the quadrangle with Langham on the way to one of the 
larger lecture rooms, which was to be the scene of the ad¬ 
dress. The room when they got in was already nearly full; 
all the working fellows of the college were present, and a body 
of some thirty men besides, most of them already far on in 
their university career. A minute or two afterward Mr. Grey 
entered. The door opening on to the quadrangle, where the 


ROBEBT ELSMERE. 


trees, undeterred by east wind, were just bursting into leaf, 
was shut; and the little assembly knelt, while Mr. Grey’s 
voice with its broad intonation, in which a strong native 
homeliness lingered under the gentleness of accent, recited the 
collect, “Lord of all power and might,” a silerit pause follow¬ 
ing the last words. Then the audience settled itself, and Mr. 
Grey, standing by a small deal table with the gas-light behind 
him, began his address. 

All the main points of the experience which followed 
stamped themselves on Robert’s mind with extraordinary in¬ 
tensity. Nor did he ever lose the memory of the outward 
scene. In after-years, memory could always recall to him at 
will the face and figure of the speaker, the massive head, the 
deep eyes sunk under the brows, the Midland accent, the 
make of limb and features which seemed to have some sugges¬ 
tion in them of the rude strength and simplicity of a peasant 
ancestry ; and then the nobility, the fire, the spiritual beauty 
flashing through it all ! Here, indeed, was a man on whom 
his fellows might lean, a man in whom the generation of 
spiritual force was so strong and continuous that it overflowed 
of necessity into the poorer, barrener lives around him, kind¬ 
ling and enriching. Robert felt himself seized and penetrated, 
filled with a fervor and an admiration which he w'as too young 
and immature to analyze, but which was to be none the less 
potent and lasting. 

Much of the sermon itself, indeed, was beyond him. It 
was of the meaning of St. Paul’s great conception, “Death 
unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness?” What did 
the apostle mean by a death to sin and self? What were the 
precise ideas attached to the words “risen with Christ”? 
Are this death and this resurrection necessarily dependent 
upon certain alleged historical events ? Or are tliey not pri¬ 
marily, and were they not, even in the mind of St. Paul, two 
aspects of a spiritual process perpetually re-enacted in the 
soul of man, and constituting the veritable revelation of God ? 
Which is the stable and lasting witness of the Father : the 
spiritual history of the individual and the world, or the envel¬ 
ope of miracle to which hitherto mankind has attributed so 
much importance? 

Mr. Grey’s treatment of these questions was clothed, 
throughout a large portion of the lecture, in metaphysical 
language, which no boy fresh from school, however intellec¬ 
tually quick, could be expected to follow with any precision. 
It was not, therefore, the argument, or the logical structure 
of the sermon, which so profoundly affected young Elsmere. 



nOBERT EL8MERE. 


67 


It was the speaker himself, and the occasional passages in 
which, addressing himself to the practical needs of his hear- 
ears, he put before them the claims and conditions of the 
higher life with a pregnant simplicity and rugged beauty of 
phrase. Conceit, selfishness, vice—how, as he spoke of them, 
they seemed to wither from his presence ! How the “pitiful, 
earthly self ” with its passions and its cravings sank into noth¬ 
ingness beside the “ great ideas ” and the “ great causes ” for 
which, as Christians and as men, he claimed their devotion. 

To the boy sitting among the crowd at the back of the 
room, his face supported in his hands and his gleaming eyes 
fixed on the speaker, it seemed as if all the poetry and history 
through which a restless curiosity and ideality had carried 
him so far took a new meaning from this experience. It was 
by men like this that the moral progress of the world had 
been shaped and inspired ; he felt brought near to the great 
primal forces breathing through the divine workshop ; and in 
place of natural disposition and reverent compliance, there 
sprang up in him suddenly an actual burning certainty of 
belief. “ Axioms are not axioms,” said poor Keats, “ till they 
have been proved upon our pulses”; and the old familiar fig¬ 
ure of the divine combat, of the struggle in which man and 
God are one, was proved once more upon a human pulse on 
that May night, in the hush of that quiet lecture-room. 

As the little moving crowd of men dispersed over the main 
quadrangle to their respective staircases, Langham and 
Robert stood together a moment in the windy darkness, 
lighted by the occasional glimmering of a cloudy moon. 

“ Thank you, thank you, sir ! ” said the lad, eager and yet 
afraid to speak, lest he should break the spell of memory. 
“ I should be sorry indeed to have missed that! ” 

“ Yes, it was fine, extraordinarily fine, the best he has ever 
given, I think. Good-night.” 

And Langham turned away, his head sunk on his breast, 
his hands behind him. Robert went to his room conscious 
of a momentary check of feeling. But it soon passed, and 
he sat up late, thinking of the sermon, or pouring out in a 
letter to his mother the new hero-worship of which his mind 
was full. 

A few days later, as it happened, came an invitation to the 
junior exhibitioner to spend an evening at Mr. Grey’s house. 
Elsmere went in a state of curious eagerness and trepidation, 
and came away with a number of fresh impressions which, 
when he had put them into order, did but quicken his new¬ 
born sense of devotion. The quiet, unpretending house with 


68 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


its exquisite neatness and its abundance of books, the family 
life, with the heart-happiness underneath, and the gentle trust 
and courtesy on the surface, the little touches of austerity 
which betrayed themselves here and there in the household 
ways—all these surroundings stole into the lad’s imagination, 
touched in him responsive fibers of taste and feeling. 

But there was some surprise, too, mingled with the charm. 
He came, still shaken, as it were, by the power of the sermon, 
expecting to see in the preacher of it the outward and visible 
signs of a leadership which, as he already knew, was a great 
force in Oxford life. His mood was that of the disciple only 
eager to be enrolled. And what he found was a quiet, 
friendly host, surrounded by a group of men talking the 
ordinary pleasant Oxford chit-chat—the river, the schools, 
the union,'the football matches, and so on. Every now and 
then, as Elsmere stood at the edge of the circle listening, the 
rugged face in the center of it would break into a smile, or 
some boyish speaker would elicit the low spontaneous laugh 
in which there was such a sound of human fellowship, such a 
genuine note of self-forgetfulness. Sometimes the conversa¬ 
tion strayed into politics, and then Mr. Grey, an eager poli¬ 
tician, would throw back his head, and talk with more sparkle 
and rapidity, flashing occasionally into grim humor which 
seemed to throw light on the innate strength and pugnacity 
of the peasant and Puritan breed from which he sprung. 
Nothing could be more unlike the inspired philosopher, the 
mystic surrounded by an adoring school, whom Robert had 
been picturing to himself in his walk up to the house, through 
the soft May twilight. 

It was not long before the tutor had learned to take much 
kindly notice of the ardent and yet modest exhibitioner, in 
whose future it was impossible not to feel a sympathetic 
interest. 

“ You will always find us on Sunday afternoons, before 
chapel,” he said to him one day as they parted after watching 
a football match in the damp mists of the park, and the boy’s 
flush of pleasure showed how much he valued the permission. 

For three years those Sunday half-hours were the great 
charm of Robert Elsmere’s life. When he came to look 
back upon them, he could remember nothing very definite. 
A few interesting scraps of talk about books ; a good deal of 
talk about politics, showing in the tutor a living interest in 
the needs and training of that broadening democracy on 
which the future of England rests ; a few graphic sajdngs 
about individuals; above all, a constant readiness on the 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


69 


host’s part to listen, to sit quiet, with the slight, unconscious 
look of fatigue which was so eloquent of a strenuous in¬ 
tellectual life, taking kindly heed of anything that sincerity, 
even a stupid, awkward sincerity, had got to say—these were 
the sort of impressions they had left behind them, re-enforced 
always, indeed, by the one continuous impression of a great 
soul speaking with difficulty and labor, but still clearly, still 
effectually, through an unblemished series of noble acts and 
efforts. 

Term after term passed away. Mrs. Elsmere became more 
and more proud of her boy, and more and more assured that 
her years of intelligent devotion to him had won her his 
entire love and confidence, so long as they both should 
live ” ; she came up to see him once or twice, making Lang- 
ham almost flee the university because she would be grateful 
to him in public, and attending the boat-races in festive attire 
to which she had devoted her most anxious attention for 
Robert’s sake, and which made her, dear, good, impracticable 
soul, the observed of all observers. When she came she and 
Robert talked all day, so far as lectures allowed, and most of 
the night, after their own eager, improvident fashion ; and 
she soon gathered, with that solemn, half-tragic sense of 
change which besets a mother’s heart at such a moment, that 
there were many new forces at work in her boy’s mind, deep 
under-currents of feeling, stirred in him by the Oxford 
influences, which must before long rise powerfully to the 
surface. 

He was passing from a bright, buoyant lad into a man, and 
a man of ardor and conviction. And the chief instrument in 
the transformation was Mr. Grey. 

Elsmere got his first in Moderations easily. But the Final 
Schools were a different matter. In the first days of his re¬ 
turn to Oxford, in the October of his third year, while he was 
still making up his lecture list, and taking a general oversight 
of the work demanded from him, before plunging definitely 
into it, he was oppressed with a sense that the two years lying 
before him constituted a problem which would be harder to 
solve than any which had yet been set him. It seemed to 
him, in a moment which was one of some slackness and re¬ 
action, that he had been growing too fast. He had been 
making friends, besides, in far too many camps, and the 
thought, half attractive, half repellent, of all these midnight 
discussions over smoldering fires, which Oxford w^as prepar¬ 
ing for him, those fascinating moments of intellectual fence 
with minds as eager and as crude as his own, and of all the 


70 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


delightful dipping into the very latest literature, which such 
moments encouraged and involved, seemed to convey a sort 
of warning to the hoy’s will that it was not equal to the situ¬ 
ation. He was neither dull enough nor great enough for a 
striking Oxford success. How was he to prevent himself from 
attempting impossibilities and achieving a final mediocrity ? 
He felt a dismal certainty that he should never be able to 
control the straybigs of will and curiosity, now into this path, 
now into that ; and a still stronger and genuine certainty that 
it is not by such digression that a man gets up the Ethics or 
the Annals. 

Langham watched him with a half-irritable attention. In 
spite of the paralysis of all natural ambitions in himself, he 
was illogically keen that Elsmere should win the distinctions 
of the place. He, the most laborious, the most disinterested 
of scholars, turned himself almost into a crammer for Els- 
mere’s benefit. He abused the lad’s multifarous reading, de¬ 
clared it was no better than dram-drinking, and even preached 
to him an ingenious variety of mechanical aids to memory 
and short cuts to knowledge, till Robert would turn round 
upon him with some triumphant retort drawn from his own 
utterances at some sincerer and less discreet moment. In 
vain. Langham felt a dismal certainty before many weeks 
were over that Elsmere would miss his first in Greats. He 
was too curious, too restless, too passionate about many things. 
Above all he was beginning, in the tutor’s opinion, to concern 
himself disastrously early with that most overwhelming and 
most brain-confusing of all human interests—the interest of 
religion. Grey had made him “ earnest ” with a vengeance. 

Elsmere was now attending Grey’s philosophical lectures, 
following them with enthusiasm, and making use of them, as 
so often happens, for the defense and fortification of vicAvs quite 
other than his teacher’s. The whole basis of Grey’s thought 
was ardently idealist and Hegelian. He had broken with the 
popular Christianity, but for him God, consciousness, duty, 
were the only realities. None of the various forms of materi¬ 
alist thought escaped his challenge ; no genuine utterance of 
the spiritual life of man but was sure of his sympathy. It 
was known that after having prepared himself for the Chris¬ 
tian ministiy he had remained a layman because it had be¬ 
come impossible to him to accept miracle ; and it was evident 
that the commoner type of Churchmen regarded him as an 
antagonist all the more dangerous because he was so sympa¬ 
thetic. But the negative and critical side of him Avas Avhat in 
reality told least upon his pupils. He was reserved, he talked 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


71 


with difficulty, and his respect for the immaturity of the young 
lives near him was complete. So that what he sowed others 
often reaped, or to quote the expression of a well-known ration¬ 
alist about him : “ The Tories were always carrying off his 
honey to their hive.” Elsmere, for instance, took in all that 
Grey had to give, drank in all the ideal fervor, the spiritual 
enthusiasm of the great tutor, and then, as Grey himself 
would have done some twenty years earlier, carried his relig¬ 
ious passion so stimulated into the service of the great posi¬ 
tive tradition around him. 

And at that particular moment in Oxford history, the pas¬ 
sage from philosophic idealism to glad acquiescence in the re¬ 
ceived Christian system was a peculiarly easy one. It was 
the most natural thing in the world that a young man of Els- 
mere’s temperament should rally to the Church. The place 
was.passing through one of those periodical crises of reaction 
against an overdriven rationalism, which show themselves with 
tolerable regularity in any great center of intellectual activity. 
It hap begun to be recognized with a great burst of enthu¬ 
siasm and astonishment that, after all. Mill and Herbert Spen¬ 
cer had not said the last word on all things in heaven and 
earth. And now there was exaggerated recoil. A fresh 
wave of religious romanticism was fast gathering strength ; 
the spirit of Newman had reappeared in the place which 
Newman had loved and left; religion was becoming once 
more popular among the most trivial souls, and a deep reality 
among a large proportion of the nobler ones. 

With this movement of opinion Robert had very soon found 
himself in close and sympathetic contact. The meager im¬ 
pression left upon his boyhood by the somewhat grotesque 
succession of the Harden curates, and by his mother’s shafts 
of wit at their expense, was soon driven out of him by the 
stateliness and comely beauty of the Church order as it was 
revealed to liim at Oxford. The religious air, the solemn 
beauty of the place itself, its innumerable associations with an 
organized and venerable faith, the great public functions and 
expressions of that faith, possessed the boy’s imagination 
more and more. As he sat Tn the undergraduates’ gallery at 
St. Mary’s on the Sundays, when the great High Church 
preacher of the moment occupied the pulpit, and looked down 
on the crowded building, full of grave, black-gowned figures, 
and framed in one continuous belt of closely packed boyish 
faces ; as he listened to the preacher’s vibrating voice, rising 
and falling with the orator’s instinct for musical effect ; or as 
he stood up with the great surrounding body of undergradu- 


72 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


ates to send tlie melody of some Latin hymn rolling into the 
far recesses of the choir, the sight and the experience touched 
liis inmost feeling, and satisfied all the poetical and dramatic 
instincts of a passionate nature. The system behind the sight 
took stronger and stronger hold upon him ; he began to wish 
ardently and continuously to become a part of it, to cast in his 
lot definitely with it. 

One May evening he was wandering by himself along the 
towing-path which skirts the upper river, a prey to many 
thoughts, to forebodings about the schools which were to begin 
in three weeks, and to speculations as to how his mother 
would take the news of the second class, which he himself felt 
to be inevitable. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, there 
flashed into his mind the little conversation with his mother 
which had taken place nearly four years before, in the garden 
at Trinity. He remembered the antagonism which theddea 
of a clerical life for him had raised in both of them, and a 
smile at his own ignorance and his mother’s prejudice passed 
over his quick young face. He sat down on the grassy bank, 
a mass of reeds at his feet, the shadows of the poplars behind 
him lying across the still river ; and opposite, the wide green 
expanse of the great town meadow, dotted with white patches 
of geese and herd of grazing horses. There, with a sense of 
something solemn and critical passing over him, he began to 
dream out his future life. 

And when he rose, half an hour afterward, and turned his 
steps homeward, he knew with an inward tremor of heart that 
tlie next great step of the way was practically taken. For there 
by the gliding river, and in view of the distant Oxford spires, 
which his fancy took to witness the act, he had vowed liimself 
in prayer and self-abasement to the ministry of the Church. 

During the three weeks that followed he made some frantic 
efforts to make up lost ground. He had not been idle for a 
single day, but he had been unwise, an intellectual spend¬ 
thrift, living in a continuous succession of enthusiasms, and 
now at the critical moment his stock of nerve and energy was 
at a low ebb. He went in depressed and tired, his friends 
watching anxiously for the result On the day of the Logic 
paper, as he emerged into the Schools quadrangle, he felt his 
arm caught by Mr. Grey. 

^ “ Come with me for a Avalk, Elsmere ; you look as if some 
air would do you good.” 

Robert acquiesced, and the two men turned into the passage¬ 
way leading out on to Radcliffe Square. 

‘‘ I have done for myself, sir,” said the youth with a sigh, 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


73 


half impatience, half depression. ‘‘ It seems to me to-day that 
I had neither mind nor memory. If I get a second I shall be 
lucky.” 

‘‘ Oh, jon will get your second whatever happens,” said Mr. 
Grey quietly, ‘‘ and you mustn’t be too much cast down about 
it if you don’t get your first.” 

This implied acceptance of his partial defeat coming from 
another’s lips, struck the excitable Robert like a lash. It was 
only what he had been saying to himself, but in the most pes¬ 
simist forecasts we make of ourselves, there is always an un¬ 
der protest of hope. 

‘‘ I have been wasting my time here lately,” he said, hurriedly 
raising his college cap from his brows as if it oppressed them, 
and pushing his hair back with a weary, restless gesture. 

“Ro,” said Mr. Grey, turning his kind, frank eyes upon 
him. “ As far as general training goes, you have not wasted 
your time at all. There are many clever men who don’t get 
a first class, and yet it is good for them to be here—so long 
as they are not loungers and idlers, of course. And you 
have not been a lounger ; you have been headstrong, and a 
little over-confident, perhaps ”—the speaker’s smile took all 
the sting out of the words—“ but you have grown into a 
man, and you are fit now for man’s work. Don’t let yourself 
be depressed, Elsmere. You will do better in life than you 
have done in examination.” 

The young man was deeply touched. The tone of personal 
comment and admonition was very rare with Mr. Grey. He 
felt a sudden consciousness of a shared burden which was 
infinitely soothing, and though he made no answer, his face 
lost something of its harassed look as the two walked on 
together down Oriel Street and into IMerton Meadows. 

“ Have you any immediate plans ? ” said Mr. Grey, as they 
turned into the Broad Walk, now in the full leafage of June, 
and rustling under a brisk western wind blowing from the 
river. 

‘‘ No ; at least I suppose it will be no good my trying for a 
fellowship. But I meant to tell you, sir, of one thing—I have 
made up my mind to take Orders.” 

“ You have ? When ? ” 

Quite lately. So that fixes me, I suppose, to come back 
for divinity lectures in the autumn.” 

Mr. Grey said nothing for awhile, and they strolled in and 
out of the great shadows thrown by the elms across their path. 

“You feel no difficulties in the way?” he asked at last, 
with a certain brusqueness of manner. 


74 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


‘‘ No,” said Robert, eagerly. ‘‘ I never had any. Per¬ 
haps,” he added, with a sudden humility, “ it is because I 
have never gone deep enough. What I believe might have 
been worth morth more if I had had more struggle ; but it 
has all seemed so plain.” 

The young voice speaking with hesitation and reserve, and 
yet with a deep inner conviction, was pleasant to hear. Mr. 
Grey turned toward it, and the great eyes under the fur¬ 
rowed brow had a peculiar gentleness of expression. 

“ You will probably be very happy in the life,” he said. 
“ The Church wants men of your sort.” 

But through all the sympathy of the tone Robert was con¬ 
scious of a veil between them. He knew, of course, pretty 
much what it was, and with a sudden impulse he felt that he 
would have given words to break through it and talk frankly 
with this man whom he revered beyond all others, wide as 
was the intellectual dilference between them. But the tutor’s 
reticence and the younger man’s respect prevented it. 

When the unlucky second class was actually proclaimed to 
the world, Langham took it to heart perhaps more than 
either Elsmere or his mother. No one knew better than he 
what Elsmere’s gifts were. It was absurd that he should not 
have made more of them in sight of the public. “ Le elerica- 
lisme voild Ve^memi ! ” was about the gist of Langham’s 
mood during the days that followed on the class list. 

Elsmere, however, did not divulge his intention of taking 
Orders to him till ten days afterward, when he had carried 
off Langham to stay at Harden, and he and his old tutor 
were smoking in his mother’s little garden one moonlighted 
night. 

When he had finished his statement Langham stood still a 
moment watching the wreaths of smoke as they curled and 
vanished. The curious interest in Elsmere’s career, which 
during a certain number of months had made him almost 
practical, almost energetic, had disappeared. He was his own 
languid, paradoxical self. 

“ Well, after all,” he said at last, very slowly, “the diffi¬ 
culty lies in preaching anything. One may as well preach a 
respectable mythology as anything else.” 

“ What do you mean by a mythology ? ” cried Robert 
hotly. 

“ Simply ideas, or experiences, personified,” said Langham. 
puffing away. “I take it they are the subject-matter of all 
theologies.” 

“ I don’t understand you,” said Robert, flushing. “ To the 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


15 


Christian, facts have been the medium by which ideas the 
world could not otherwise have come at have been communi¬ 
cated to man. Christian theology is a system of ideas indeed, 
but of ideas realized, made manifest in facts.” 

Langham looked at him for a moment, undecided ; then 
that suppressed irritation we have already spoken of broke 
through. 

“ How do you know they are facts ? ” he said dryly. 

The younger man took up the challenge with all his natural 
eagerness, and the conversation resolved itself into a discus¬ 
sion of Christian evidences. Or rather Robert held forth, and 
Langham kept him going by an occasional remark which acted 
like the prick of a spur. The tutor’s psychological curiosity 
was soon satisfied. He declared to himself that the intellect 
had precious little to do with Elsmere’s Christianity. He had 
got hold of all the stock apologetic arguments, and used them, 
his companion admitted, with ability and ingenuity. But 
they were merely the outworks of the citatel. The inmost 
fortress was held by something wholly distinct from intellect¬ 
ual conviction—by moral passion, by love, by feeling, by that 
mysticism, in short, which no healthy youth should be 
without. 

“ He imagines he has satisfied his intellect,” was the inward 
comment of one of the most melancholy of sceptics, “ and 
he has never so much as exerted it. What a brute I am to 
protest! ” 

And suddenly Langham threw up the sponge. He held out 
his hand to his companion, a momentary gleam of tenderness 
in his black eyes, such as on one or two critical occasions be¬ 
fore had disarmed the impetuous Elsmere. 

“ No use to discuss it further. You have a strong case, of 
course, and you have put it well. Only, when you are pegging 
away at reforming and enlightening the world, don’t trample 
too much on the people who have more than enough to do to 
enlighten themselves.” 

As to Mrs. Elsmere, in this new turn of her son’s fortunes, 
she realized with humorous distinctiveness that for some years 
past Robert had been educating her as wejl as himself.^ Her 
old rebellious sense of something inherently absurd in the 
clerical status had been gradually slain in her by her long con¬ 
tact through him with the finer and more imposing aspects of 
church life. She was still on light skirmishing terms with the 
Harden curates, and at times she would fiame out into the 
wildest, wittiest threats and gibes, for the momentary satis- 
f;iction of her own essentially lay instincts ; but at bottom 


76 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


she knew perfectly well that, when the moment came, no 
mother could he more loyal, more easily imposed upon, than 
she would be. 

“ I suppose, then, Robert, we shall be back at Murewell be¬ 
fore very long,” she said to him one morning abruptly, study¬ 
ing him the while out of her small, twinkling eyes. Wliat 
dignity there was already in the young, lightly built frame ! 
what frankness and character in the irregular, attractive face ! 

‘‘Mother,” cried Elsmere indignantly, “what do you take 
me for ? Do you imagine I am going to bury myself in the 
country at five or six-and-twenty, take six hundred a year, 
and nothing to do for it ? That would be a deserter’s act 
indeed.” 

Mrs. Elsmere shrugged her shoulders. “ Oh, I supposed you 
would insist on killing yourself, to begin with. To most peo¬ 
ple nowadays that seems to be the necessary preliminary of a 
useful career.” 

Robert laughed and kissed her, but her question had stirred 
him so much that he sat down that very evening to write to 
his cousin Mowbray Elsmere. He had announced to him that 
he was about to read for Orders, and that at the same time he 
relinquished all claim on the living of Murewell. “ Do what 
you like with it when it falls vacant,” he wrote, “ without ref¬ 
erence to me. My views are strong that before a clergyman 
in health and strength, and in no immediate want of money, 
allows himself the luxury of a country parish, he is bound, for 
some years at any rate, to meet the challenge of evil and pov¬ 
erty where the fight is hardest—among our English town pop¬ 
ulation.” 

Sir Mowbray Elsmere replied, curtly, in a day or two, to the 
effect that Robert’s letter seemed to him superfluous. He, Sir 
Mowbray, had nothing to do with his cousin’s views. When 
the living was vacant—the present holder, however, was un¬ 
common tough and did not mean dying—he should follow out 
the instructions of his father’s will, and if Robert did not want 
the thing he could say so. 

In the autumn Robert and his mother went back to Oxfoi-d. 
The following spring he redeemed his Oxford reputation com¬ 
pletely by winning a Fellowship at Merton after a brilliant 
fight with some of the best men of his year, and in June he 
was ordained. 

In the summer term some teaching work was offered him 
at Merton, and by Mr. Grey’s advice he accepted it, thus post¬ 
poning for a while that London curacy and that stout grapple 
with human need at its sorest for which his soul was pining. 


nOBERT ELSMERE. 


11 


“ Stay here a year or two,” Grey said bluntly ; you are at 
the beginning of your best learning time, and you are not one 
of the natures who can do without books. You will be all the 
better worth having afterward, and there is no lack of work 
here for a man’s moral energies.” 

Langham took the same line, and Elsmere submitted. Three 
happy and fruitful years followed. The young lecturer de¬ 
veloped an amazing power of work. That concentration 
which he had been unable to achieve for himself his will was 
strong enough to maintain when it was a question of meeting 
the demands of a college class in which he was deeply inter¬ 
ested. He became a stimulating and successful teacher, and 
one of the most popular of men. His passionate sense of re¬ 
sponsibility toward his pupils made him load himself with 
burdens to which he was constantly physically unequal, and fill 
the vacations almost as full as the terms. And as he was 
comparatively a man of means, his generous, impetuous temper 
was able to gratify itself in ways that would have been impos¬ 
sible to others. The story of his summer reading-parties, for 
instance, if one could have unraveled it, would have been 
found to be one long string of acts of kindness toward men 
poorer and duller than himself. 

At the same time he formed close and eager relations with 
the heads of the religious party in Oxford. Plis mother’s 
Evangelical training of him and Mr. Grey’s influence, together, 
perhaps with certain drifts of temperament, prevented him 
from becoming a High Churchman. The sacramental, cere¬ 
monial view of the Church never took hold upon him. But to 
the English Church as a national institution for the promotion 
of God’s work on earth no one could have been more deeply 
loyal, and none coming close to him could mistake the fervor 
and passion of his Christian feeling. At the same time he did 
not know what rancor or bitterness meant, so that men of all 
shades of Christian belief reckoned a friend in him, and he 
went through life surrounded by an unusual, perhaps a dan¬ 
gerous amount of liking and atfection. He threw himself 
ardently into the charitable work of Oxford, now helping a 
High Church vicar, and now toiling with Grey and one or two 
other Liberal fellows, at the maintenance of a coffee-palace 
and lecture-room just started by them in one of the suburbs ; 
while in the second year of his lectureship the success of 
some first attempts at preaching fixed the attention of the re¬ 
ligious leaders upon him as upon a man certain to make his 
mark. ^ . 

So the three years passed—years not, perhaps, of great in- 


IS 


EOBERf ELSMERE. 


tellectual advance, for other forces in him than those of the 
intellect were mainly to the fore, but years certainly of con¬ 
tinuous growth in character and moral experience. And at the 
end of them Mowbray Elsmere made his offer, and it was ac¬ 
cepted. 

The secret of it, of course, was overwork. Mrs. Elsmere, 
from the little house in Merton Street, where she had estab¬ 
lished herself, had watched her boy’s meteoric career through 
these crowded months with very frequent misgivings. No 
one knew better than she that Robert was constitutionally not 
of the toughest fiber, and she realized long before he did that 
the Oxford life as he Avas bent on leading it must end for him 
in premature breakdown. But, as always happens, neither 
her remonstrances, nor Mr. Grey’s common sense, nor Lang- 
ham’s fidgety protests had any effect on the young enthusiast to 
whom self-slaughter came so easy. During the latter half of 
his third year of teaching he was continually being sent away 
by the doctors, and coming back only to break down again. At 
last, in the January of his fourth year, the collapse became so 
decided that he consented, bribed by the prospect of the Holy 
Land, to go away for three months to Egypt and the East, ac¬ 
companied by his mother and a college friend. 

Just before their departure news reached him of the death 
of the rector of Mure well, followed by a formal offer of the 
living from Sir Mowbray. At the moment when the letter 
arrived he was feeling desperately tired and ill, and in after¬ 
life he never forgot the half-superstitious thrill and deep sense 
of depression with which he received it. For within him was 
a slowly emerging, despairing conviction that he was indeed 
physically unequal to the claims of his Oxford work, and, if so, 
still more unequal to grappling with the hardest pastoral labor 
and the worst forms of English poverty. And the coinci¬ 
dence of the Murewell incumbent’s death struck his sensitive 
mind as a divine leading. 

But it was a painful defeat. He took the latter to Grey, 
and Grey strongly advised him to accept. 

You overdrive your scruples, Elsmere,” said the Liberal 
tutor, with emphasis. “ No one can say a living Avith one 
thousand two hundred souls, and no curate, is a sinecure. As 
for hard town work, it is absurd—you couldn’t stand it. And 
after all, I imagine, there are some souls Avorth saving out of 
the tOA\ms.” 

Elsmere pointed out vindictively that family livings were a 
corrupt and indefensible institution. Mr. Grey replied, calmly, 
that they probably were, but that the fact did not affect, so 


ROBERT EL8MERE, 


79 


far as lie could see, Elsmere’s competence to fulfil all the 
duties of rector of Mure well. 

“After all, my dear fellow,” he said, a smile breaking over 
his strong, expressive face, “ it is well even for reformers to 
be sane.” 

Mrs. Elsmere was passive. It seemed to her that she had 
foreseen it all along. She was miserable about his health, but 
she too had a moment of superstition, and wonld not urge him. 
Murewell was no name of happy omen to her—she had passed 
the darkest hours of her life there. 

In the end Robert asked for delay, which was grudgingly 
granted him. Then he and his mother and friend fled over 
seas : he feverishly determined to get well and cheat the fates. 
But, after a halcyon time in Palestine and Constantinople, a 
whiff of poisoned air at Cannes, on their way home, acting on 
a low constitutional state, settled matters. Robert was laid 
up for weeks with malarious fever, and when he struggled out 
again into the hot Riviera sunshine it was clear to himself and 
everybody else that he must do what he could, and not what 
he would, in the Christian vineyard. 

“ Mother,” he said one day, suddenly looking at her as she 
sat near him working, “ can you be happy at Murewell ? ” 

There was a wistfulness in the long, thin face, and a pathe¬ 
tic accent of surrender in the voice, which hurt the mother’s 
heart. 

“ I can be happy wherever you are,” she said, laying her 
brown, nervous hand on his blanched one. 

“ Then give me pen and paper and let me write to Mowbray. 
I wonder whether the place has changed at all. Heigh ho ! 
IIow is one to preach to people who have stuffed you up with 
gooseberries, or swung you on gates, or lifted you over puddles 
to save your petticoats ? I wonder what has become of that 
boy whom I hit in the eye with my bow and arrow, or of that 
other lout who pummeled me into the middle of next week for 
disturbing his bird-trap ? By the way, is the squire—is 
Roger Wendover—living at the Hall now ?” 

He turned to his mother with a sudden start of interest. 

“ So I hear,” said Mrs. Elsmere dryly. “ He won’t be much 
good to you.” 

He sat on meditating while she went for pen and paper. 
He had forgotten the squire of Murewell. But Roger Wend¬ 
over, the famous and eccentric owner of Murewell Hall, hermit 
and scholar, possessed of one of the most magnificent libra¬ 
ries in England, and author of books which had carried a re¬ 
volutionary shock into the heart of English society, was not 


80 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


a ligure to be overlooked by any rector of Miirewell, least of 
all by one possessed of Robert’s culture and imagination. 

The yonng man ransacked his memory on the subject with a 
sudden access of interest in his new home that was to be. 

Six weeks later they were in England, and Robert, now con¬ 
valescent, had accepted and invitation to spend a month in 
Long AVhindale with his mother’s cousins, the Thornburghs, 
who offered him quiet, and bracing air. He was to enter on his 
duties at Mure well in July, the bishop, who had been made 
aware of his Oxford rejjutation, welcoming the new recruit to 
the diocese with marked warmth of manner. 

CHAPTER VI. 

“ Agnes, if you want any tea, here it is,” cried Rose, calling 
from outside through the the dining-room window ; “ and tell 
mamma.” 

It was the first of June, and the spell of warmth in which 
Robert Elsmere had arrived was still maintaining itself. An 
intelligent foreigner dropped into the flower-sprinkled valley 
might have believed that, after all, England, and even northern 
England, had a summer. Early in the season as it was, the 
sun was already drawing the color out of the hills ; the young 
green, hardly a week or two old, was darkening. Except the 
oaks. They were brilliance itself against tbs luminous gray- 
blue sky. So were the beeches, their young downy leaves just 
unpacked, tumbling loosely open to the light. But the larches 
and the birches and the hawthorns were already sobered by a 
longer acquaintance with life and Phoebus. 

Rose sat fanning herself with a portentous hat, which when 
in its proper place served her, apparently, both as hat and as 
parasol. She seemed to have been running races with a fine 
colly, who lay at her feet panting, but studying her with his 
bright eyes, and evidently ready to be off again at the first in¬ 
dication that his playmate had recovered her wind. Chattie 
was coming lazily over the lawn, stretching each leg behind her 
as she walked, tail arched, green eyes flaming in the sun, a 
model of treacherous beauty. 

“ Chattie, you fiend, come here ! ” cried Rose, holding out 
a hand to her ; “ if Miss Barks were ever pretty she must 
have looked like you*at this moment.” 

“ I won’t have Chattie put upon,” said Agnes, establishing 
herself at the other side of the little tea-table ; “ she has done 
you no harm. Come tome, beastie. Zwon’t compare you to 
disagreeable old maids.” 

The cat looked from one sister to the other, blinking ; then 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


81 


with a sudden magnificent spring leaped on to Agnes’s lap 
and curled herself up there. 

‘‘Nothingbut cupboard love,” said Rose scornfully, in an¬ 
swer to Agnes’s laugh ; “ she knows you will give her bread and 
butter and I won’t, out of a double regard for my skirts and 
her morals. Oh, dear me ! Miss Barks was quite seraphic 
last night; she never made a single remark about my clothes, 
and she didn’t even say to me, as she generally does, with an 
air of compassion, that she ‘ quite understands how hard it 
must be to keep in tune.’ ” 

“ The amusing thing was Mrs. Seaton and Mr. Elsmere,” 
said Agnes. “ 1 just love, as Mrs. Thornburgh says, to hear 
her instructing other people in their own particular trades. 
She didn’t get much change out of him.” 

Rose gave Agnes her tea, and then, bending forward, with 
one hand on her heart, said, in a stage whisper, with a drama¬ 
tic glance round the garden : “ My heart is whole. How is 
yours ? ” 

said Agnes calmly, “as the French bric-a-brac 
man in the Brompton Road used to say of his pots. But he 
is very nice.” 

“ Oh, charming ! But when my destiny arrives ”—and Rose, 
returning to her tea, swept her little hand with a tea-spoon in 
it eloquently round—“he won’t have his hair cut close. I 
must have luxuriant locks, and I will take no excuse ! Tine 
chevelure de poete, the eye of an eagle, the mustajche of a hero, 
the hand of a Rubinstein, and, if it pleases him, the tem¬ 
per of a fiend. He will be odious, insufferable for all the 
world besides, except for me ; and for me he will be heaven.” 

She threw herself back, a twinkle in her bright eye, but a 
little flush of something half real on her cheek. 

“ No doubt,” said Agnes dryly. “But you can’t wonder if 
under the circumstances I don’t pine for a brother-in-law. 
To return to the subject, however, Catherine liked him. She 
said so.” 

“ Oh, that doesn’t count,” replied Rose discontentedly : 
“ Catherine likes everybody—of a certain sort—and every¬ 
body likes Catherine.” 

“Hoes that mean. Miss Hasty,” said her sister, “that you 
have made up your mind Catherine will‘never marry ? ” 

“ Marry ! ” cried Rose. “ You might as well talk of marry¬ 
ing Westminster Abbey.” 

Agnes looked at her attentively. Rose’s fun had a decided 
lack"of sweetness. “After all,” she said, demurely, “St. 
Elizabeth married.” 


82 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


“ Yes, but then she was a princess. Reasons of state. If 
Catherine were ‘ her royal highness ’ it would be her duty to 
marry, which would just make all the difference. Duty ! I 
hate the word.” 

And Rose took up a fir cone lying near and threw it at the 
nose of the colly, who made a jump at it, and then resumed 
an attitude of blinking and dignified protest again his mis¬ 
tress’s follies. 

Agnes again studied her sister. What’s the matter with 
you, Rose ? ” 

“ The usual thing, my dear,” replied Rose curtly, “ only 
more so. I had a letter this morning from Carry Ford—the 
daughter, you know, of those nice people I stayed in Man¬ 
chester with, last year. Well, she wants me to go and stay 
the winter with them and study under a first-rate man, Fran- 
zen, who is to be in Manchester two days a week during the 
winter. I haven’t said a word about it—what’s the use ? I 
know all Catherine’s arguments by heart. Manchester is 
not Whindale, and papa wished us to live in Whindale ; I 
am not somebody else and needn’t earn my bread ; and art is 
not religion ; and—” 

“ Wheels ! ” exclaimed Agnes. “ Catherine, I suppose, 
home from Whinborough.” 

Rose got up and peered through the rhododendron bushes 
at the top of the wall which shut them off from the road. 

“ Catherine, and an unknown. Catherine driving at a foot’s 
pace, and the unknown walking beside her. Oh, I see, of 
course—Mr. Elsrnere. lie will come in to tea, so I’ll go for a 
cup. It is his duty to call on us to-day.” 

When Rose came back in the wake of her mother, Catherine 
and Robert Elsrnere were coming up the drive. Something 
had given Catherine more color than usual, and as Mrs. Ley- 
burn shook hands with the young clergyman her mother’s 
eyes turned approvingly to her eldest daughter. “ After all, 
she is as handsome as Rose,” she said to herself—‘‘ though it 
is quite a different style.” 

Rose, who was always tea-maker, dispensed her wares; 
Catherine took her favorite low seat beside her mother, 
clasping Mrs. Leyburn’s thin mittened hand awhile tenderly 
in her own. Robert‘and Agnes set up a lively gossip on the 
subject of the Thornburghs’ guests, in which Rose joined, 
while Catherine looked smiling on. She seemed apart from 
the rest, Robert thought; not, clearly, by her own will, but 
by virtue of a difference of temperament which could not but 
make itself felt. Yet once as Rose passed her, Robert saAV 


ROBERT EL83IERE. 


83 


her stretch out her hand and toiicli her sister caressingly, with a 
bright upward look and smile as though she would say : “ Is 
all well ? have you had a good time this afternoon, Roschen ? ” 
Clearly the strong contemplative nature was not strong 
enough to dispense with any of the little wants and cravings 
of human affection. Compared to the main impression she 
was making on him, her suppliant attitude at her mother’s 
feet and her caress of her sister were like flowers breaking 
through the stern March soil and changing the whole spirit 
of the fields. 

Presently he said something of Oxford, and mentioned 
Merton. Instantly Mrs. Leyburn fell upon him. Had he 
ever seen Mr. S—, who had been a Fellow there, and Rose’s 
godfather ? 

“ I don’t acknowledge him,” said Rose, pouting. “ Other 
people’s godfathers give them mugs and corals. Mine never 
gave me anything but a Concordance.” 

Robert laughed, and proved to their satisfaction that Mr. 
S— had been extinct before his day. But could they ask 
him any other question ? Mrs. Leyburn became quite ani¬ 
mated, and, diving into her memory, produced a number of 
fragmentary reminiscences of her husband’s Queen’s friends, 
asking him for information about each and all of them. The 
young man disentangled all her questions, racked his brains 
to answer, and showed all through a quick friendliness, a 
charming deference as of youth to age, which confirmed the 
liking of the whole party for him. Then the mention of 
an associate of Richard Leyburn’s youth, who had been one 
of the Tractarian leaders, led him into talk of Oxford changes 
and the influences of the present. He drew for them the 
famous High Church preacher of the moment, described the 
great spectacle of his Bampton lectures, by which Oxford 
had been recently thrilled, and gave a dramatic account of a 
sermon on evolution preached by the hermit-veteran Pusey, 
as though by another Elias returning to the world to deliver 
a last warning message to men. Catherine listened absorbed, 
her deep eyes fixed upon him. And though all he said was 
pitched in a vivacious narrative key and addressed as much to 
tlie others as to her, inwardly it seemed to him that his one 
object all through was to touch and keep her attention. 

Then, in answer to inquiries about himself, he fell to 
describing St. Anselm’s with enthusiasm—its growth, its 
provost,, its effectiveness as a great educational machine, the 
impression it had made on Oxford and the country. This led 
him naturally to talk of Mr. Grey, then, next to the provost, 


84 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


the mo.st prominent figure in the college ; and once embarked 
on this theme he became more eloquent and interesting than 
ever. The circle of women listened to him as to a voice from 
the large world. He made them feel the beat of the great 
currents of English life and thought; he seemed to bring the 
stir and rush of our central English society into the deep 
quiet of their valley. Even the bright-haired Rose, idly 
swinging her pretty foot, with a head full of dreams and dis¬ 
content, was beguiled, and for the moment seemed to lose 
her restless self in listening. 

He told an exciting story of a bad election riot in Oxford 
which had been quelled at considerable personal risk by Mr. 
Grey, who had gained his influence in the town by a devotion 
of years to the policy of breaking down, as far as possible, 
the old venomous feud between city and university. 

When he paused, Mrs. Leyburn said, vaguely : “ Did you 
say he was a canon of somewhere ?” 

“ Oh, no,” said Robert, smiling, “ he is not a clergyman.” 

“ But you said he preached,” said Agnes. 

“Yes—but lay sermons—addresses. He is not one of us 
even, according to your standard and mine.” 

“ A Nonconformist? ” sighed Mrs. Leyburn. “ Oh, I know 
they have let in everybody now.” 

“ Well, if you like,” said Robert. “ What I meant was 
that his opinions are not orthodox. He could not be a 
clergynian, but he is one of the noblest of men ! ” 

He spoke with aifectionMe warmth. Tlien suddenly Cath¬ 
erine’s eyes met his, and he felt an involuntary start. A veil 
had fallen over them ; her sweet moved sj^mpathy was gone ; 
she seemed to have shrunk into herself. 

She turned to Mrs. Leyburn. “ Mother, do you know, I 
have all sorts of messages from Aunt Ellen,”—and in an under¬ 
voice she began to give Mrs. Leyburn the news of her after¬ 
noon expedition. 

Rose and Agnes soon plunged young Elsmere into another 
stream of talk. But he kept his feeling of perplexit}". His 
experience of other women seemed to give him nothing to go 
upon witii regard to Miss Leyburn. 

Presently Catherine got up and drew her plain little black 
cape round her again. 

“ My dear ! ” remonstrated Mrs. Leyburn. “ Where are you 
off to now ? ” 

“ To the Backhouses, mother,” she said, in a low voice ; “ I 
have not been there for two days. I must go this evening.” 
Mrs. Leyburn said no more. Catherine’s “musts” were 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


85 


never disputed. She moved toward Elsmere with outstretched 
hand. But he also sprung up. 

“ I, too, must he going,” he said ; “ I have paid you an un¬ 
conscionable visit. If you are going past the vicarage. Miss 
Leyburn, may I escort you so far ? ” 

She stood quietly waiting while he made his farewells. Ag¬ 
nes, whose eye fell on her sister during the pause, was struck 
with a passing sense of something out of the common. She 
could hardly have defined her impression, but Catherine seemed 
more alive to the outer world, more like other people, less 
nun-like, than usual. 

When they had left the garden together, as they had come 
into it, and Mrs. Leyburn, complaining of chilliness, had re¬ 
treated to the drawing-room. Rose laid a quick hand on her 
sister’s arm. 

You say Catherine likes him ? Ow ! what is a great deal 
more certain is that he likes her.” 

“ Well,” said Agnes calmly—“ well, I await your remarks.” 

“Poor fellow,” said Rose grimly, and removed her hand. 

Meanwhile Elsmere and Catherine walked along the valley 
road toward the vicarage. He thought, uneasily, she was a 
little more reserved with him than she had been in those pleas¬ 
ant moments after he had overtaken her in the pony carriage; 
but still she was always kind, always courteous. And what a 
white hand it was, hanging ungloved against her dress ! what 
a beautiful dignit}^ and freedom, as of mountain winds and 
mountain streams, in every movement! 

“You are bound for High Ghyll ? ” he said to her as they 
neared the vicarage gate. “Is it not a long way for you? 
You have been at a meeting already, your sister said, and 
teaching this morning ! ” 

He looked down on her with a charming diffidence as 
though aware that their acquaintance was very young, and yet 
with a warm eagerness of feeling piercing through. As she 
paused under his eye the slightest flush rose to Catherine’s 
cheek. Then she looked up with a smile. It was amusing to 
be taken care of b}^ this tall stranger. 

“ It is most unfeminine, I am afraid,” she said, “ but I 
couldn’t be tired if I tried.” 

Elsmere grasped her hand. 

“ You make me feel myself more than ever a shocking ex¬ 
ample,” he said, letting it go with a little sigh. The smart of 
his own renunciation was still keen in him. She lingered a 
moment, could find nothing to say, threw him a look all shy 
sympathy and lovely pity, and was gone. 


86 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


In the evening Robert got an explanation of that sudden 
stiffening in his auditor of the afternoon, which had perplexed 
him. He and the vicar were sitting smoking in • the study 
after dinner, and the ingenious young man managed to shift 
the conversation on to the Leyburns, as he had managed to shift 
it once or twice before that day, flattering himself, of course, 
on each occasion that his maneuvers were beyond detection. 
The vicar, good soul, by virtue of his original discovery, de¬ 
tected them all, and with a sense of appropriation in the mat¬ 
ter, not at all unmixed with a sense of triumph over Mrs. T., 
kept the ball rolling merrily. 

“ Miss Leyburn seems to have very strong religious views,” 
said Robert, d propos of some remark of the vicar’s as to the 
assistance she was to him in the school. 

“ Ah, she is her father’s daughter,” said the vicar genially. 
He had his oldest coat on, his favorite pipe between his lips, 
and a bit of domestic carpentering on his knee at which he 
was fiddling away, and, being perfectly happy, was also per¬ 
fectly amiable. “ Richard Leyburn was a fanatic—as mild as 
you please, but immovable.” 

“ What line ? ” 

“Evangelical, with a dash of Quakerism. He lent me 
‘ Madame Guyon’s Life ’ once to read. I didn’t appreciate 
it. I told him that for all her religion she seemed to me to 
have a deal of the vixen in her. He could hardly get over it : 
it nearly broke our friendship. But I suppose he was very like 
her, except that, in my opinion, his nature was sweeter. He 
was a fatalist—saw leadings of Providence in every little thing. 
And such a dreamer ! When he came to live up liere just be¬ 
fore his death, and all his active life was taken off him, I be¬ 
lieve half his time he was seeing visions. He used to Avander 
over the fells and meet you with a start, as though you be¬ 
longed to another world than the one he was walking in.” 

“ And his eldest daughter was much with him ? 

“ The apple of his ej^e. She understood him. He could 
talk his soul out to her. The others, of course, Avere children ; 
and his Avife—Avell, his Avife Avas just A<diat you see her noAV, 
])0or thing. He must have married her Avhen slie was very 
young and A^ery pretty. She Avas a squire’s daughter some- 
Avhere near the school of Avhich he was master—a good family, 
I believe—she’ll tell you so, in a lady-like way. He Avas ahvays 
fidgety about her health. He loved her, I suppose, or had 
loved her. But it was Catherine Avho had his mind ; Catherine 
who was his friend. She adored him. I believe there Avas al¬ 
ways a sort of pity in her heart for him, too. But at any rate 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


87 


he made her and. trained her. He poured all his ideas and 
convictions into her.” 

“ Which were strong ? ” 

“ Uncommonly. For all his gentle, ethereal look, you could 
neither bend nor break him. I don’t believe anybody but 
Richard Leyburn could have gone through Oxford at the height 
of the Oxford Movement, and, so to speak, have known noth¬ 
ing about it, while living all the time for religion. He had a 
great deal in common with the Quakers, as I said ; a great deal 
in common with the Wesleyans ; but he was very loyal to the 
church, all the same. He regarded it as the golden mean. 
George Herbert was his favorite poet. He used to carry his 
poems about with him on the mountains, and an expurgated 
‘ Christian Year’—the only thing he ever took from the High 
Churchman—which he had made for himself, and which he 
and Catherine knew by heart. In some ways he was not a 
bigot at all. He would have had the church make peace with 
the dissenters ; he was all for upsetting tests so far as uncon¬ 
formity was concerned. But he drew the most rigid line be¬ 
tween belief and unbelief. He would not have dined at the 
same table with a Unitarian if he could have helped it. I re¬ 
member a furious article of his in the ‘ Record ’ against admit¬ 
ting Unitarians to the universities or allowing them to sit in 
Parliament. ‘England is a Christian state,’ he said ; ‘ they are 
not Christians ; they have no right in her except on sufferance.’ 
Well, I suppose he was about right,” said the vicar, with a 
sigh “ We are all so half-hearted nowadays.” 

“ Hot he,” cried Robert, hotly. “ Who are we that because 
a man differs from us in opinion we are to shut him out from 
the education of political and civil duty ? But never mind. 
Cousin William. Go on.” 

“ There’s no more that I remember, except that of course 
Catherine took all these ideas from him. He wouldn’t let his 
children know any unbeliever, however apparently worthy 
and good. He impressed it upon them as their special sacred 
duty, in a time of wicked enmity to religion, to cherish the 
faith and the whole faith. He wished his wife and daughters 
to live on here after his death that they might be less in danger 
spiritually than in the big world, and that they might have 
more opportunity of living the old-fashioned Christian life. 
There was also some mystical idea, I think, of making up 
through his children for the godless lives of their forefathers. 
He used to reproach himself for having in his prosperous days 
neglected his family, some of whom he might have helped to 
taise.” 


88 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


Well, but,” said Robert, ‘‘ all very well for Miss Leyburn, 
but I don’t see the father in the two younger girls.” 

“ Ah, there is Catherine’s didiculty,” said the vicar, shrug¬ 
ging his shoulders. “ Poor thing ! How well I remember her 
after her father’s death ! She came down to see me in the din¬ 
ing-room about some arrangement for the funeral. She was 
only sixteen, so pale and thin with nursing. I said something 
about the comfort she had been to her father. She took my 
hand and burst into tears. ‘ He was so good ! ’ she said ; ‘ I 
loved him so ! Oil, Mr. Thornburgh, help me to look after the 
others ! ’ And that’s been her one thought since then—that, 
next to following the narrow road.” 

The vicar had begun to speak with emotion, as generally 
happened to him whenever he was beguiled into much speech 
about Catherine Leyburn. There must have been something 
great somewhere in the insignificant elderly man. A meaner 
soul might so easily have been jealous of this girl with her in¬ 
conveniently high standards, and her influence, surpassing his 
own, in his own domain. 

“ I should like to know the secret of the little musician’s 
independence,” said Robert, musing. “ There might be no tie 
of blood at all between her and the elder, so far as I can see.” 

“ Oh, I don’t know that ! There’s more than you think, or 
Catherine wouldn’t have kept her hold over her so far as she 
has. Generally she gets her way, except about the music. 
There Rose sticks to it.”. 

“ And why shouldn’t she ?” 

“Ah, well, you see, my dear fellow, I am old enough, and 
you’re not, to remember what people in the old days used to 
think about art. Of course nowadays we all say very fine 
things about it; but Richard Leyburn would no more have 
admitted that a girl who hadn’t got her own bread or her 
family’s to earn by it was justified in spending her time in 
fiddling than he would have approved of her spending it in 
dancing. I have heard him take a text out of the ‘ Imitation ’ 
and lecture Rose when she was quite a bab}^ for pestering any 
stray person she could get hold of to give her music lessons. 
‘ Woe to them’—yes, that was it—‘that inquire many curious 
things of men, and care little about the way of serving Me.’ 
However, he wasn’t consistent. Nobody is. It was actually 
he that brought Rose her first violin froni London in a green 
baize bag. Mrs Leyburn took me in one night to see her 
asleep with it on her pillow, and all her pretty curls lying 
over the strings. I dare say, poof man, it was one of the acts 
toward his children that tormented his mind in his last hour.” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


89 


‘‘She has certainly had her way about practicing it : she 
plays superbly.” 

she has had her way. She is a queer mixture, is 
Rose. I see a touch of the old Leyburn recklessness in her? 
and then there is the beauty and refinement of her mother’s 
side of the family. Lately she has got quite out of hand. 
She went to stay with some relations they have in Manchester, 
got drawn into a musical set there, took to these funny gowns, 
and Jiow she and Catherine are always half at war. Poor 
Catherine said the other day, with tears in her eyes, that she 
knew Rose thouglit her as hard as iron. “ But what can I 
do ? ” she said. ‘ I promised papa.’ She makes herself mis¬ 
erable, and it’s no use. I wish the little wild thing would get 
herself well married. She’s not meant for this humdrum 
place, and she may kick over the traces.” 

“She’s pretty enough for anything and anybody,” said 
Robert. 

The vicar looked at him sharply, but the young man’s criti¬ 
cal and meditative look reassured him. 

The next day, just before early dinner. Rose and Agnes, 
who had been for a walk, were startled, as they were turning 
into their own gate, by the frantic waving of a white handker¬ 
chief from the vicarage garden. It was Mrs. Thornburgh’s 
accepted way of calling the attention of the Burwood inmates, 
and the girls walked on. They found the good lady waiting 
for them in the drive in a characteristic glow and flutter. 

“ My dears, I have been looking out for j^^ou all the morn¬ 
ing. I should have come over but for the stores coming, and 
a tiresome man from Randall’s. I’ve had to bargain with 
him for a whole hour about taking back those sweets. I was 
swindled, of course, but we should have died if we’d had to 
eat them up. Well now, my dears—” 

The vicar’s wife paused. Her square, short figure was be¬ 
tween the two girls ; she had an arm of each, and she looked 
significantly from one to another, her gray curls flapping 
across her face as she did so. 

“Go on, Mrs. Thornburgh,” cried Rose. “You make us 
quite nervous.” 

“ How do you like Mr. Elsmere ? ” she inquired solemnly. 

“ Very much,’’ said both in chorus. 

JMrs Thornburgh surveyed Rose’s smiling frankness with 
a little sigh. Things were going grandly, but she could 
imagine a disposition of affairs which would have given her 
personally more pleasure. 


90 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


Hoio—would — you — like —liim for a brother-in-law ? ” she 
inquired, beginning in a whisper, with slow emphasis, patting 
Rose’s arm, and bringing out the last words with a rush. 

Agnes caught the twinkle in Rose’s eye, but she answered 
for them both demurely : 

“We have no objection to entertain the idea. But you 
must explain.” 

“ Explain ! ” cried Mrs. Thornburgh. “ I should think it 
explains itself. At least if you’d been in this house the last 
twenty-four hours you’d think so. Since the moment when 
he first met her, it’s been ‘Miss Leyburn,’ ‘Miss Lej^burn,’ 
all the time. One might have seen it with half an eye from 
the beginning.” 

Mrs. Thornburgh had not seen it with two eyes, as we 
know, till it was pointed out to her ; but her imagination 
worked with equal liveliness backward or forward. 

“ He went to see you yesterday, didn’t he—yes, I know he 
did—and he overtook her in the pony-carriage—the vicar saw 
them from across the valley—and he brought her back from 
your house, and then he kept William up till nearly twelve 
talking of her. And now he wants a picnic. Oh, its as plain 
as a pike-stalf. And, my dears, nothing to be said against 
him. Fifteen hundred a year if he’s a penny. A nice living, 
only his mother to look after, and as good a young fellow as 
ever stepped.” 

Mrs. Thornburgh stopped, choked almost by her own elo¬ 
quence. The girls, who'had by this time established her 
between them on a garden-seat, looked at her with smiling 
composure. They were accustomed to letting her have her 
budget out. 

“ And now, of course,” she resumed, taking breath, and 
chilled a little by their silence, “ now, of course, I want to 
know about Catherine ? ” She regarded them with anxious 
interrogation. Rose, still smiling, slowly shook her head. 

“ What ! ” cried Mrs. Thornburgh ; then, with charm¬ 
ing inconsistency, “oh, you can’t know anything in two 
days.” 

“ That’s just it,” said Agnes, intervening ; “we can’t know 
anything in two daj^s. No one ever will know anything 
about Catherine, if she takes to anybody, till the last minute.” 

Mrs. Thornburgh’s face fell. “ It’s very difficult when 
people will be so reserved,” she said, dolefully. 

The girls acquiesced, but intimated that they saw no way 
out of it. 

“ At any rate we can bring them together,” she broke out, 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


91 


briglitening again. ‘‘We can have picnics, you know, and 
teas, and all that—and watch. Now listen.” 

And the vicar’s wife sketched out a programme of festivi¬ 
ties for the next fortnight she had heeii revolving in her 
inventive head, which took tlie sisters’ breath away. Rose 
bit her lip to keep in her laughter. Agnes, with vast self- 
possession, took Mrs. Thornburgh in hand. She pointed out 
firmly that nothing would be so likely to make Catherine 
impracticable as fuss. “ In vain is the net spread,” etc. 
She preached from the text with a worldly wisdom which 
quickly crushed Mrs. Thornburgh, 

♦ Well, what am I to do, my dears ? ” she said at last, help¬ 
lessly. ‘‘Look at the weather ! We must have some picnics, 
if it’s only to amuse Robert! ” 

Mrs. Thornburgh spent her life between a condition of 
effervescence and a condition of feeling the world too much 
for her. Rose and Agnes, having now reduced her to the 
latter state, proceeded cautiously to give her her head again. 
They promised her two or three expeditions and one picnic at 
least ; they said they would do their best ; they promised 
they would report what they saw and be very discreet, both 
feeling the comedy of Mrs. Thornburgh as the advocate of 
discretion ; and then they departed to their early dinner, 
leaving the vicar’s wife decidedly less self-confident than they 
found her. 

“The first matrimonial excitement of the family,” cried 
Agnes, as they walked home. “ So far no one can say the 
Misses Leyburn have been besieged ! ” 

“ It will be all moonshine,” Rose replied, decisively. “ Mr. 
Elsmere may lose his heart; we may aid and abet him ; 
Catherine will live in the clouds for a few weeks, and come 
down from them at the end with the air of an angel, to give 
him his coup de grdce. As I said before—poor fellow ! ” 

Agnes made no answer. She was never so positive as 
Rose, and on the whole did not find herself the worse for it 
in life. Besides, she understood that there was a soreness at 
the bottom of Rose’s heart that was always showing itself in 
unexpected connections. 

There was no necessity, indeed, for elaborate schemes for 
assisting Providence. Mrs. Thornburgh had her picnics and 
her expeditions, but without them Robert Elsmere would 
have been still man enough to see Catherine Leyburn every 
day. He loitered about the roads along which she must needs 
pass to do her many offices of charity ; he offered the vicar 
to take a class in the school, and was naively exultant that 


92 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


the vicar curiously happened to fix an hour when he must 
needs see Miss Leyburn going or coming on the same errand ; 
he dropped into Burwood on any conceivable pretext, till 
Rose and Agnes lost all inconvenient respect for his cloth, 
and Mrs. Leyburn sent him on errands ; and he even insisted 
that Catherine and the vicar should make use of him and his 
pastoral services in one or two of the cases of sickness or 
poverty under their care. Catherine, with a little more 
reserve than usual, took him one day to the Tyson’s, and 
introduced him to the poor crippled son who was likely to 
live on paralyzed for some time, under the weight, moreover, 
of a black cloud of depression which seldom lifted. Mrs? 
Tyson kept her talking in the room, and she never forgot 
the scene. It showed her a new aspect of a man whose intel¬ 
lectual life was becoming plain to her, while his moral life 
was still something of a mystery. The look in Elsmere’s face 
as he sat bending over the maimed young farmer, the 
strength and tenderness of the man, the diflidence of the few 
religious things he said, and yet the reality and force of them, 
struck her powerfully. He had forgotten her, forgotten 
everything save the bitter human need, and the comfort it 
was his privilege to offer. Catherine stood answering Mrs. 
Tyson at random, the tears rising in her eyes. She slipped 
out while he was still talking, and went home strangely 
moved. 

As to the festivities, she did her best to join in them. The 
sensitive soul often reproached itself afterward for having 
juggled in the matter. Was it not her duty to manage a 
little society and gayety for her sisters sometimes ? Her 
mother could not undertake it, and was always plaintively 
protesting that Catherine would not be young. So for a 
short week or two Catherine did her best to be young, and 
climbed the mountain grass, or forded the mountain streams 
with the energy and the grace of perfect health, trembling 
afterward at night as she knelt by her window to think how 
much sheer pleasure the day had contained. Her life had 
always had the tension of a bent bow. It seemed to her once 
or twice during this fortnight as though something were sud¬ 
denly relaxed in her, and she felt a swift Bunyan-like terror 
of backsliding, of falling away. Bus she never confessed 
herself fudy ; she was even blind to what her perspicacity 
would have seen so readily in another’s case—the little arts 
and maneuvers of those about her. It did not strike her that 
Mrs. Thornburgh was more flighty and more ebullient than 
ever ; that the vicar’s wife kissed her at odd times, and with 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


93 


a qwite unwonted effusion ; or that Agnes and Rose, when 
they were in the wild lieart of the mountains, or wandering 
far and wide in search of sticks for a picnic fire, showed a 
perfect genius for avoiding Mr. Elsmere, whom both of them 
liked, and that in consequence his society almost always fell 
to her. Nor did she ever analyze what would have been the 
attraction of those walks to her without that tall figure at her 
side, that bounding step, that picturesque, impetuous talk. 
There are moments when Nature throws a kind of heavenly 
mist and dazzlement round the soul it would fain make happy. 
The soul gropes blindly on ; if it saw its way it might be 
timid and draw back, but kind powers lead it genially onward 
through a golden darkness. 

Meanwhile if she did not know herself, she and Elsmere 
learned with wonderful quickness and thoroughness to know 
each other. The two households so near together, and so 
isolated from the world besides, were necessarily in constant 
communication. And Elsmere made a most stirring element 
in their common life. Never had he been more keen, more 
strenuous. It gave Catherine new lights on modern charac¬ 
ter altogether to see how he was preparing himself for this 
Surrey living—reading up the history, geology, and botany of 
the Weald and its neighborhood, plunging into reports of 
agricultural commissions, or spending his quick brain on vil¬ 
lage sanitation, with the oddest results sometimes, so far as 
his conversation was concerned. And then in the middle of 
disquisitions, which would keep her breathless with a sense of 
being whirled through space at the tail of an electric kite, 
the kite would come down with a run, and the preacher and 
reforaier would come, hat in hand, to the girl beside him, 
asking her humbly to advise him, to pour out on him some of 
that practical experience of hers among the poor and suffering, 
for the sake of which he would in an instant scornfully fling 
out of sight all his own magnificent plannings. Never had 
she told so much of her own life to any one ; her conscious¬ 
ness of it sometimes filled her with a sort of terror, lest she 
might have been trading, as it were, for her own advantage 
on the sacred things of God. But he would have it. Ilis 
sympathy, his sweetness, his quick spiritual feeling drew the 
stories out of her. And then how his bright, frank eyes 
would soften ! With what a reverence would he touch her 
hand when she said good-by ! 

And on her side she felt that she knew almost as much 
about Mure well as he did. She could imagine the wild beauty 
of the Surrey heathland, she could see the white square rec- 


94 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


tory with its sloping walled garden, the juniper common just 
outside the straggling village ; she could even picture the 
strange squire, solitary in the great Tudor Hall, tlie author of 
terrible books against the religion of Christ of which she 
shrank from hearing, and share the anxieties of the young 
rector as to his future relations toward a personality so 
marked and so important to every soul in the little commun¬ 
ity he was called to rule. Here all was plain sailing ; she 
understood him perfectly, and her gentle comments, or her 
occasional sarcasms, were friendliness itself. 

But it was when he turned to larger things—to books, 
movements, leaders of the day—that she was often puzzled, 
sometimes distressed. Why should he seem to exalt and 
glorify rebellion against the established order in the person of 
Mr. Grey ? Or why, ardent as his own faith was, would he 
talk as though opinion was a purely personal matter, hardly 
in itself to be made the subject of moral judgment at all, and 
as though right belief were a blessed privilege and boon 
rather than a law and an obligation ? When his comments 
on men and things took this tinge she Avould turn silent, feel¬ 
ing a kind of painful opposition b«tween his venturesome 
speech and his clergyman’s dress. 

And yet, as we well know, these ways of speech were not 
his own. He was merely talking the natural Christian 
language of this generation ; whereas, she, the child of a 
mystic—solitary, intense, and deeply reflective from her 
earliest youth—was still thinking and speaking in the 
language of her father’s generation. 

But although, so often as his unwariness brought him near 
to these points of jarring, he would hurry away from them, 
conscious that here was the one profound difference between 
them, it was clear to liim that insensibly she had moved fur¬ 
ther than she knew from her father’s stand-point. Even among 
those solitudes, far from men and literature, she had uncon¬ 
sciously felt the breath of her time in some degree. As he 
penetrated deeper into the nature he found it honeycombed, as 
it were, here and there, with beautiful, unexpected softnesses 
and diffidences. Once, after a long walk, as they were 
lingering homeward under a cloudy evening sky, he came 
upon the great problem of her life—Rose and Rose’s art. He 
drew her difficulty from her with the most delicate skill. She 
had laid it bare, and was blushing to think how she had asked 
his counsel, almost before she knew where their talk was 
leading. How was it lawful for the Christian to spend the 
few short years of the earthly combat in any pursuit, how- 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


95 


ever noble and exquisite, which merely aimed at the gratifica¬ 
tion of the senses, and implied in the pursuer the emphasizing 
rather than the surrender of self ? 

He argued it very much as Kingsley would have argued it, 
tried to lift her to a more intelligent view of a multifarious 
world, dwelling on the function of pure beauty in life, and on 
the influence of beauty on character, pointing out the value to 
the race of all individual development, and pressing home on 
her the natural religious question : how are the artistic apti¬ 
tudes to be explained unless the Great Designer meant them 
to have a use and function in his world ? Slie replied, doubt¬ 
fully, that she had always supposed they were lawful for 
recreation, and like any other trade for bread-winning, 
but— 

Then he told her much that he knew about tlie humaniz¬ 
ing effect of music on the poor. He described to her the 
efforts of a London society, of which he was a subscribing 
member, to popularize the best music among the lowest class ; 
he dwelt almost with passion on the difference between the joy 
to be got out of such things and the common brutalizing joys 
of the workman. And you could not have art without 
artists. In this again he was only talking the commonplaces 
of his day. But to her they were not commonplaces at all. 
She looked at him from time to time, her great eyes lighten¬ 
ing and deepening as it seemed with every fresh thrust of 
his. 

“ I am grateful to you,” she said at last, with an involun¬ 
tary outburst, ‘‘ I am very grateful to you ! ” 

And she gave a long sigh as if some burden she had long 
borne in patient silence had been loosened a little, if only by. 
the fact of speech about it. She was not convinced exactly. 
She was too strong a nature to relinquish a principle without 
a period of meditative struggle in which conscience should 
have all its dues. But her tone made his heart leap. He felt 
in it a momentary self-surrender that, coming from a creature 
of so rare a dignity, filled him with an exquisite sense of 
power, and yet at the same time with a strange humility 
beyond words. 

A day or two later he was the spectator of a curious little 
scene. An aunt of the Leyburns living in Whinborough came 
to see them. She was their father’s youngest sister, and the 
wife of a man who had made some money as a builder in 
Whinborough. When Robert came he found her sitting on 
the sofa having tea, a large, homely-looking woman with gray 
hair, a high brow, and prominent white teeth. She had 


96 


ROBERT EL8MEER. 


unfastened her bonnet-strings, and a clean white handkerchief 
1 ly spread out on her lap. When Elsmere was introduced to 
her, she got uj^, and said, with some effusiveness and a 
distinct Westmoreland accent: 

Very pleased indeed to make your acquaintance, sir,” 
while she inclosed his fingers in a capacious hand. 

Mrs. Leyburn, looking fidgety and uncomfortable, was sit¬ 
ting near her, and Catherine, the only member of the party 
who showed no sign of embarrassment when Robert entered, 
was superintending her aunt’s tea and talking busily the 
while. Robert sat down at a little distance beside Agnes and 
Rose, who were chattering together a little artificially and of 
set purpose as it seemed to him. But the aunt was not to be 
ignored. She talked too loud not to be overheard, and Agnes 
inwardly noted that as soon as Robert Elsmere appeared she 
talked louder than before. He gathered j^resently that she 
was an ardent Wesleyan, and that she was engaged in des¬ 
cribing to Catherine and Mrs. Leyburn the evangelistic ex¬ 
ploits of her eldest son, who had recently obtained his first 
circuit as a Wesleyan minister. He was shrewd enough, too, 
to guess, after a minute or two, that his presence and prob¬ 
ably his obnoxious clerical dress gave additional zest to the 
recital. 

“ Oh, his success at Colesbridge has been somethin’ marvel¬ 
ous,” he heard her say, with uplifted hands and eyes, “ some¬ 
thin’ marvelous. The Lord has blessed him indeed ! It doesn’t 
matter what it is, whether it’s meetin’s, or sermons, or parlor 
work, or just faithful dealin’s with souls one by one. Satan 
has no cliverer foe than Edward. He never shuts his eyes ; 
as Edward says himself, it’s like trackin’ for game is huntin’ for 
souls. Why, the other day he was walkin’ out from Coventry 
to a service. It was the Sabbath, and he saw a man in a bit 
of grass by the road-side, mendin’ his cart. And he stopped, 
did Edward, and gave him the Word strong. The man 
seemed puzzled like, and said he meant no harm. ‘ Ho harm ! ’ 
says Edward, ‘ when you’re just doin’ the devil’s work every 
nail you put in, and hammerin’ away, mon, at your own dam¬ 
nation.’ And here’s his letter.” And while Rose turned 
away to a far window to hide an almost hysterical inclination 
to laugh, Mrs. Fleming opened her bag, took out a treasured 
paper, and read, with the emphasis and the unction peculiar 
to a certain type of revivalism : 

“ Poor sinner ! He was much put about. I left him, pray¬ 
ing the Lord my shaft might rankle in him : ay, might fester 
aud burn in him till he found no peace but in Jesus. He 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


97 


seemed very dark and destitute—no respect for the Word or 
its ministers. A bit further I met a boy carrying a load of 
turnips. To liim, too, I was faithful, and he went on, taking, 
without knowing it, a precious leaflet with him in his bag. 
Glorious work ! If AVesleyans will but go on claiming even 
tlie highways for God, sin will skulk yet.’ ” 

A dead silence. Mrs. Fleming folded up the letter and put 
it back into her bag. 

‘‘There’s your true minister,” she said, with a large, judicial 
utterance as she closed the snap. “ Wherever he goes, 
Edward must have souls ! ” 

And she threw a swift, searching look at the young clergy¬ 
man in the window. 

“ He must have very hard work with so much walking and 
preaching,” said Catherine gently. 

Somehow, as soon as she spoke, Elsmere saw the whole odd 
little scene with other eyes. 

“ His work is just wearin’ him out,” said the mother fer¬ 
vently ; “ but a minister doesn’t think of that. Wherever 
he goes there are sinners saved. He stayed last week at a 
house near Nuneaton. At family prayer alone there were 
five saved. And at the prayer-meetin’s on the Sabbath such 
outpourin’s of the Spirit! Edward comes home, his wife tells 
me, just ready to drop. Are you acquainted, sir,” she added, 
turning suddenly to Elsmere, and speaking in a certain tone 
of provocation, “with the labors of our Wesleyan ministers?” 

“ No,” said Robert, with his pleasant smile, “ not person¬ 
ally. But I have the greatest respect for them as a body of 
devoted men.” 

The look of battle faded from the woman’s face. It was 
not an unpleasant face. He even saw strange reminiscences 
of Catherine in it at times. 

“ You’re aboot right there, sir. Not that they dare take 
any credit to themselves—it’s grace, sir, all grace.” 

“ Aunt Ellen,” said Catherine, while a sudden light broke 
over her face. “ I just want you to take Edward a little 
story from me. Ministers are good things, but God can do 
without them.” 

And she laid her hand on her aunt’s knee with a smile in 
which there was the slightest touch of affectionate satire. 

“ I was up among the fells the other day,” she went on : 
“ I met an elderly man cutting wood in a plantation, and I 
stopped and asked him how he was. ‘Ah, miss,’he said, 
‘ verra weel, verra week And yet it was nobbut Friday morn¬ 
ing lasst, I cam’ oop here, awfu’ bad in my sperrits like. For 


98 


BOBERT ELSMERE. 


my wife she’s sick, an’ a’ dwinnelt away, and I’m gettin’ auld, 
and can’t wark as I’d used to, and it did luke to me as thoo 
there was naethin’ afore us nobbiit t’ union. And t’ mist wal¬ 
low on t’ fells, and I sat oonder t’ wall, wettish and broodin’ 
like. And theer—all ov a soodent the Lord found me ! Yes, 
puir Reuben Judge, as dawn’t matter to naebody, the Lord 
found un. It was leyke as thoo His feeace cam’ a-glisterin’ 
an’ a-shinin’ through t’ mist. An’ iver sence then, miss, aa’ve 
jest felt as thoo aa could a’ cut an’ stackt all t’ wood on t’ 
fell in naw time at a’! ’ And he waved his hand round the 
mountain side which was covered with plantation. And all 
the way along the path for ever so long I could hear him sing¬ 
ing, choi^ping away, and quavering out: ‘Rock of Ages.’” 

She paused ; her delicate face, with just a little quiver in 
the lip, turned to her aunt, her eyes glowing as though a hid¬ 
den fire had leaped suddenly outward. And yet the gesture, 
the attitude, was sini])licity and unconsciousness itself. Rob¬ 
ert had never heard her say anything so intimate before. Nor 
had he ever seen her so inspired, so beautiful. She had trans¬ 
muted the conversation at a touch. It had been barbarous 
prose; she had turned it into purest poetry. Only the 
noblest souls have such an alchemy as this at command, 
thought the watcher on the other side of the room with a 
passionate reverence. 

“ I wasn’t thinkin’ of narrowin’ the Lord down to minis¬ 
ters,” said Mrs. Fleming, with a certain loftiness. “We all 
know He can do with us puir worms.” 

Then, seeing that no one replied, the good woman got up 
to go. Much of her apparel had slipped awaj^ from her in the 
fervors of revivalist anecdote, and while slie hunted for gloves 
and reticule—officiously helped by the younger girls—Robert 
crossed over to Catherine. 

“ You lifted us on to your own high places ! ” he said, bend¬ 
ing down to her ; “ I shall carry your story with me through 
the fells.” 

She looked up, and as she met his warm, moved look, a little 
glow and tremor crept into the face, destroying its exalted 
expression. He broke the spell ; she sank from the poet into 
the embarrassed woman. 

“You must see my old man,” she said, with an effort; 
“ he is worth a library of sermons. I must introduce him 
to you.” 

He could think of nothing else to say just then, but could 
only stand impatiently wishing for Mrs. Fleming’s disappear¬ 
ance, that he might somehow appropriate her eldest niece. 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


99 


But alas ! when she went, Catherine went out Avitli hei’, and 
reappeared no more, tliOugh he waited some time. 

He walked home in a whirl of feeling ; on the Avay he 
stopped, and leaning over a gate which led into one of the 
river-fields gave himself up to the mounting tumult within. 
Gradually, from the half-articulate chaos of hope and mem- 
ory, there emerged the deliberate voice of his inmost man¬ 
hood. 

“ In her and her only is my heart’s desire ! She and she 
only if she will, and God will, shall be my wife.” 

He lifted his head and looked out on the dewy field, the 
evening beauty of the hills, with a sense of immeasurable 
change— 

“ Tears 

Were in his eyes, and in his ears 
The murmur of a thousand years.” 

He felt himself knit to his kind, to his race, as had never 
felt before. It was as though, after a long apprenticeship, he 
liad sprung suddenly into maturity—entered at last into the 
full human heritage. But the veiy intensity and solemnity of 
his own feelings gave him a rare clear-sightedness. He real¬ 
ized that he had no certainty of success, scarcelj' even an en¬ 
tirely reasonable hope. But what of that? Were they not 
together, alone, practically, in these blessed solitudes? 
Would they not meet to-morrow, and next day, and the day 
after? Were not time and opportunity all his own ? How 
kind her looks are even now ? Courage ! And through that 
maidenly kindness his own passion shall send the last trans¬ 
muting glow. 

CHAPTER YII. 

The following morning about noon. Rose, who had been 
coaxed and persuaded by Catherine, much against her will, 
into taking a singing class at the school, closed the school door 
behind her with a sigh of relief, and tripped up the road to 
Burwood. 

“ How abominally they sung this morning ! ” she said to 
herself with curving lip. ‘‘ Talk of the natural north-country 
gift for music ! What ridiculous fictions people set up ! Dear 
me, what clouds ! Perhaps we shan’t get our walk to Shan- 
moor after all, and if we don’t, and if—if ’’—her cheek flushed 
with a sudden excitement—‘‘ if Mr. Elsmere doesn’t propose, 
]\Irs. Tiiornburgh will be unmanageable. It is all Agnes 
and I can do to keep her in bounds sls it is, and if some- 


100 


BOBEBT ELSMEBE. 


thing doesn’t come off to-day, she’ll be for reversing the 
usual proceeding, and asking Catherine her intentions, which 
would ruin everything.” 

Then raising her head she swept her eyes round the sky. 
Tlie wind was freshening, the clouds were coming up fast from 
the westward ; over the summit of High Fell and the crags 
on either side, a gray straight-edged curtain was already low¬ 
ering. 

“ It will hold up yet awhile,” she thought, “ and if it rains 
later we can get a carriage at Shanmoor and come back by the 
road.” 

And she walked on homeward, meditating, her thin fingers 
clasped before her, the wind blowing her skirts, the blue rib¬ 
bons on her hat, the little gold curls on her temples, in a 
pretty, many-colored turmoil about her. When she got to 
Burwood she shut herself into the room which was peculiarly 
hers, the room which had been a stable. Now it was full of 
artistic odds and ends—her fiddle of course, and piles of 
music, her violin stand, a few deal tables and cane chairs 
beautified by a number of chiffrons^ bits of liberty stuffs with 
the edges still ragged, or cheap morsels of Syrian embroidery.’ 
On the tables stood photographs of musicians and friends— 
the spoils of her visits to Manchester, and of two visits to 
London which gleamed like golden points in the girl’s memoiy. 
The plastered walls were covered with an odd medley. Here 
was a round mirror, of which Hose was enormously proud. 
She had extracted it from a farm-house of the neighborhood, 
and paid for it with her own money. There a group of unfin¬ 
ished headlong sketches of the most fiercely impressionist de¬ 
scription—the work and the gift of a knot of a knot of Man¬ 
chester artists, who had feted and flattered the beautiful little 
Westmoreland girl, when she was staying among them, to her 
heart’s content. Manchester, almost alone among our great 
towns of the present day, has not only a musical, but a pictorial 
life of its own ; its young artists dub themselves ‘‘ a school,” 
study in Paris, and when they come home scout the Academy 
and its methods, and pine to set up a rival art-center, skilled in 
all the methods of the Salon, in the murky North. Rose’s uncle, 
originally a clerk in a warehouse, and a rough diamond enough, 
had more or less moved with the times, like his brother Rich¬ 
ard ; at any rate he had grown rich, had married a decent wife 
and was glad enough to befriend his dear brother’s children, 
who wanted nothing of him, and did their uncle a credit of 
which he was sensible, by their good manners and good looks. 
Music was the only point at which he touched the culture of 


ROBERT EL8MEUE. 


101 


the times, like so many business men ; but it pleased him also 
to pose as a patron of local art; so that when Rose went to 
stay with her childless uncle and aunt, she found long-haired 
artists and fiery musicians about the place, who excited and 
encouraged her musical gift, who sketched her while she 
played, and talked to the pretty, clever, unformed creature of 
London and Paris and Italy, and set her pining for that golden 
vie de Bohhne which she alone apparently of all artists was 
destined never to know. 

For she was an artist—she would be an artist—let Catherine 
say what she would ! She came back from Manchester rest¬ 
less for she knew notwhat, thirsty for the joys and emotions of 
art, determined to be free, reckless, passionate ; with Wagner 
and Brahms in her young blood ; and found Burwood waiting 
for her—Burwood, the lonely house in the lonely valley, of 
which Catherine was the presiding genius. Catherine ! For 
Rose, what a multitude of associations clustered round the 
name ! To her it meant everything at this moment against 
which her soul rebelled—the most scrupulous order, the most 
rigid self-repression, the most determined sacrificing of “ this 
warm kind world,” with all its indefensible delights, to a cold 
other-world with its torturing, inadmissible claims. Even in 
the midst of her stolen joys at Manchester or London, this 
mere name, the mere mental image of Catherine moving 
through life wrapped in a religious peace and certainty as 
austere as they were beautiful, and asking of all about her the 
same absolute surrender to an awful Master she gave so easily 
herself, was enough to chill the wayward Rose, and fill her 
with a kind of restless despair. And at home, as the vicar 
said, the two sisters were always on the verge of conflict. 
Rose had enough of her father in her to suffer in resisting, but 
resist she must by the law of her nature. 

Now, as she threw off her walking things, she fell first upon 
her violin, and rushed through a Brahms’s “ Liebeslied,” her 
eyes dancing, her whole light form thrilling with tlie joy of 
it; and then with a sudden revulsion she stopped playing, 
and threw herself down listlessly by the open window. Close 
by against the wall was a little looking-glass, by wliich she 
often arranged her ruffled locks ; she glanced at it now ; it 
showed her a brilliant face enough, but drooping lips, 
and eyes darkened with the extravagant melancholy of 
eighteen. 

‘‘ It is come to a pretty pass,’’ she said to herself, “ that I 
should be able to think of nothing but schemes for getting 
Catherine married and out of the way ! Considering what 


102 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


she is and what I am, and how she has slaved for us all her 
life, I seem to have descended pretty low. Heigh ho ! ” 

And with a portentous sigh she dropped her chin on her 
hand. She was half acting, acting to herself. Life was not 
really quite unbearable, and she knew it. But it relieved her 
to overdo it. 

“ I wonder how much chance there is,” she mused presently. 
‘‘Mr. Elsmere will soon be ridiculous. Why, I saw him 
gather up those violets she threw away yesterday on Moor 
Crag. And as for her, I don’t believe she has realized the 
situation a bit. At least, if she has she is as unlike other 
mortals in this as in everything else. But when she does—” 

She frowned and meditated, but got no light on the 
problem. Chattie jumped up on the window-sill, with her 
usual stealthy aplomb^ and rubbed herself against the girl’s 
face. 

“ Oh, Chattie ! ” cried Rose, throwing her arms round the 
cat, “ if Catherine’ll 07ily marry Mr. Elsmere, my dear, and be 
happy ever afterward, and set me free to live my own life a 
bit. I’ll be so good, you won’t know me, Chattie. And you 
shall have a new collar, my beauty, and cream till you die 
of it! ” 

And springing up she dragged in the cat, and snatching a 
scarlet anemone from a bunch on the table, stood opposite 
Chattie, who stood slowly moving her magnificent tail from 
side to side, and glaring as though it were not at all to her 
taste to be hustled and b^ustled in this way. 

“Now, Chattie, listen ! Will she?” 

A leaf of the flower dropped on Chattie’s nose. 

“Won’t she? Will she? Will— Tiresome flower, why 
did Nature give it such a beggarly few petals ? If I’d had a 
daisy it would have all come right. Come, Chattie, waltz, 
and let’s forget this wicked world ! ” 

And, snatching up her violin, the girl broke into a Strauss 
waltz, dancing to it the while, her cotton skirts flying, her 
pretty feet twinkling, till her eyes glowed, and her cheeks 
blazen with a double intoxication—the intoxication of move¬ 
ment, and the intoxication of sound—the cat meanwhile 
following her with little mincing, perplexed steps, as though 
not knowing what to make of her. 

“ Rose, you madcap ! ” cried Agnes, opening the door. 

“Not at all, my dear,” said Rose calmly, stopping to take 
breath. “ Excellent practice, and uncommonly difficult. Try 
if you can do it, and see ! ” 

The weather held up in a gray, grudging sort of way, and 



ROBERT EL8MERE. 


103 


Mrs. Thornburgh especially was all for braving the clouds 
and going on with the expedition. It was galling to her that 
she herself would have to be driven to Shanmoor behind the 
fat vicarage pony, Avhile the others would be climbing the 
fells, and all sorts of exciting things might be happening. 
Still it was infinitely better to be half in it than not in it at 
all, and she started by the side of the vicarage “ man ” in a 
most delicious fiutter. The skies might fall any day now. 
Elsmere had not confided in her, though she was unable to 
count the openings she had given him thereto. For one of 
the frankest of men he had kept his secret, so far as words 
went, with a remarkable tenacity. Probably the neighbor¬ 
hood of Mrs. Thornburgh was enough to make the veriest 
chatterbox secretive. But notwithstanding, no one possess¬ 
ing the clew could live in the same house with him these 
June days without seeing that the whole man was absorbed, 
transformed, and that the crisis might be reached at any 
moment. Even the vicar was eager and watchful, and play¬ 
ing up to his wife in fine style, and if the situation had so 
worked on the vicar, Mrs. Thornburgh’s state is easier 
imagined than described. 

The walk to Shanmoor need not be chronicled. The party 
kept together. Robert fancied sometimes that there was a 
certain note of purpose in the way in which Catherine clung 
to the vicar. If so it did not disquiet him. Never had she been 
kinder, more gentle. Nay, as the walk went on a lovely gay- 
ety broke through her tranquil manner, as though she, like the 
others, had caught exhilaration from the sharpened breeze and 
the towering mountains, restored to all their grandeur by the 
storm-clouds. 

And yet she had started in some little inward trouble. She 
had promised to join this walk to Shanmoor, she had promised 
to go with the others on a picnic the following day, but her 
conscience was'pricking her. Twice this last fortnight had 
she been forced to give up a night-school she held in a little 
lonely hamlet among the fells, because even she had been too 
tired to walk there and back after a day of physical exertion. 
Were not the world and the flesh encroaching ? She had been 
conscious of a strange inner restlessness as they all stood wait' 
ing in the road for the vicar and Elsmere. Agnes had thought 
her looking depressed and pale, and even dreamed for a 
moment of suggesting to her to stay at home. And then ten 
minutes after they had started it had all gone, her depression, 
blown away by tlie winds, or charmed away by a happy voice, 
a manly presence, a keen responsive eye ? 


104 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Elsmere, indeed, Avas gayety itself. He ket^t up an inces¬ 
sant war with Rose ; he had a number of little jokes going at 
the vicar’s expense, which kept that good man in a half-pro¬ 
testing chuckle most of the way; he cleared every gate that 
presented itself, in first-rate Oxford form, and climbed every 
point of rock with a cat-like agility that set the girls scoffing 
at the pretense of invalidism under which he had foisted him¬ 
self on Whin dale. 

“How fine all this black purple is!” he cried, as they 
topped the ridge, and the Shanmoor valley lay before them, 
bounded on the other side by line after line of mountain, 
Wetherlam and the Pikes and Fairfield in the far distance, 
piled somberly under a somber sky. “ I had grown quite tired 
of the sun. He had done his best to make you commonplace.” 

“Tired of the sun in Westmoreland ? ” said Catherine, with 
a little mocking wonder. “ How wanton, how prodigal ! ” 

“ Does it deserve a Nemesis ? ” he said, laughing. “ Drown¬ 
ing from noAV till I depart ? No matter. I can bear a second 
deluge with an even mind. On this enchanted soil all things 
are welcome ! ” ^ 

She looked up, smiling at his vehemence, taking it all as a 
tribute to the country, or to his own recovered health. He 
stood leaning on his stick, gazing, however, not at the view 
but at her. The others stood a little way off laughing and 
chattering. As their eyes met, a strange new pulse leaped up 
in Catherine. 

“ The wind is very boisterous here,” she said, with a shiver. 
“ I think Ave ought to be going on.” 

And she hurried up to the others, nor did she leaA^e their 
shelter till they were in sight of the little Shanmoor inn, Avhere 
they were to have tea. The pony-carriage Avas already stand¬ 
ing in front of the inn, and Mrs. Thornburgh’s gray curls shak¬ 
ing at the windoAV. 

“ William ! ” she shouted, “ bring them in. Tea is just 
ready, and Mr. Ruskin was here last week, and there are ever 
so many new names in the visitors’ book ! ” 

While the girls went in, Elsmere stood looking a moment at 
the inn, the bridge, and the village. It Avas a characteristic 
Westmoreland scene. The Ioav, whitewashed inn, with its 
neAAdy painted sign-board, was to his right, the pony at the 
door lazily flicking off the flies and dropping its greedy nose in 
search of the grains of corn among the cobbles ; to his left a 
gray stone bridge over a broad, light-filled river; beyond, a 
little huddled village backed by and apparently built out of 
the P-reat slate quarry which represented the only industry of 


ROBERT ELSMERB. 


105 


the neighborhood, and a tiny towered church—the scene on 
the Sabbath of Mr. Mayl^ew’s ministrations. Beyond the 
village, shoulders of purple fell, and behind the inn masses of 
broken crag rising at the very head of the valley into a fine 
pike, along whose jagged edges the rain-clouds were trailing. 
There was a little lurid storm-light on the river, but, in 
general, the color was all dark and rich, the white inn gleam¬ 
ing on a green and purple background. He took it all into 
his heart, covetously, greedily, trying to fix it there forever. 

Presently he was called in by the vicar, and found a tempt- 
ing tea spread in a light upper room, where Agnes and Rose 
were already making fun of the chromo-lithographs and rum¬ 
maging the visitors’ book. The scrambling, chattering meal 
passed like a flash. At the beginning of it Mrs. Thornburgh’s 
small gray eyes had traveled restlessly from face to face, as 
though to say: “ What—no news yet ? Nothing happened? ” 
As for Elsmere, though it seemed to him at tlie time one of 
the brightest moments of existence, he remembered little after¬ 
ward but the scene : the peculiar clean mustiness of the room 
only just opened for the summer season, a print of the Princess 
of Wales on the walls opposite him, a stuffed fox over the 
mantel-piece, Rose’s golden head and heavy amber necklace, 
and the figure at the vicar’s right, in a gown of a little dark- 
blue check, the broad hat shading the white brow and lumi¬ 
nous eyes. When tea was over they lounged out on the bridge. 
There was to be no long lingering, however. The clouds 
were deepening, the rain could not be far off. But if they 
started soon they could probably reach home before it came 
down. Elsmere and Rose hung over the gray stone parapet, 
mottled with the green and gold of innumerable mosses, and 
looked down among the fringe of English maiden-hair growing 
along the coping, into the clear eddies of the stream. Sud¬ 
denly he raised himself on one elbow, and, shading his eyes, 
looked to where the vicar and Catherine were standing in front 
of the inn, touched for an instant by a beam of fitful light 
slipping between two great rain-clouds. 

‘‘ How well that hat and dress become your sister ! ” he said, 
the words breaking, as it were, from his lips. 

Do you think Catherine pretty ? ” said Rose, with an excel¬ 
lent pretense of innocence, detaching a little pebble and fling¬ 
ing it harmlessly at a water-wagtail balancing on a stone below. 

lie flushed. * “ Pretty ! You might as well ap})ly the word 
to your niountains, to the exquisite river, to tha.*^^ ^>-reat purple 
peak-! ” 

“ Yes,” thought Rose, ‘‘ she is not unlike that high cold 


106 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


peak ! ” But her girlish sympathy conquered her ; it was very 
exciting, and she liked Elsmere. She turned back to him, her 
face overspread with a quite irrepressible smile. He reddened 
still more, then they stared into each other’s eyes, and without 
a word more understood each other perfectly. 

Rose held out her hand to him with a little brusque hon com- 
arade gesture. He pressed it warmly in his. 

“That was nice of you ! ” he cried. “Very nice of you ! 
Friends then ? ” 

She nodded and drew her hand away just as Agnes and the 
vicar disturbed them. 

Meanwhile Catherine was standing by the side of the pony- 
carriage, watching Mrs. Thornburgh’s preparations. 

“ You’re sure you don’t mind driving home alone ? ” she said, 
in a troubled voice. “ Mayn’t I go with you ? ” 

“ My dear, certainly not ! As if I wasn’t accustomed to 
going about alone at my time of life ! No, no, my dear, you 
go and have your walk ; you’ll get home before the rain. 
Ready, James.” 

The oTS vicarage factotum could not imagine what made his 
charge so anxious to be off. She actually took the whip out 
of his hand and gave a flick to the pony, who swerved and 
started off in a way which would have made his mistress 
clamorously nervous under any other circumstances. Cather¬ 
ine stood looking after her. 

“NoW) then, right about face and quick march ! ” exclaimed 
the vicar. “ AVe’ve got to race that cloud over the Pike. It’ll 
be up with us in no time.” 

Off they started, and were soon climbing the slippery green 
slopes, or crushing through the fern of the fell they had de¬ 
scended earlier in the afternoon. Catherine for some little way 
walked last of the party, the vicar in front of her. Then 
Elsmere picked a stone-crop, quarreled over its ])recise name 
with Rose, and waited for Catherine, who had a very close and 
familiar knowledge of the botany of the district. 

“ You have crushed me,” he said, laughing, as he put the 
flower carefully into his pocket-book ; “Tmt it is worth while 
to be crushed by any one who can give so much ground for 
their knowledge. How you do know your mountains—from 
their peasants to their ])lants.” 

“ I have had more than ten able-bodied years living and 
scrambling among them,” she said, siniling. 

“Do you keep up all your visits and teaching in the 
winter ?” 

' ^h, not so much, of course ! But people must be helped 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


107 


and taught in the winter. And our winter is often not as hard 
as yours down south.” 

“ Do you go on with that night-school in Poll Ghyll, for in¬ 
stance ? ” he said, with another note in his voice. 

“ Catherine looked at him and colored. “ Rose been tell¬ 
ing tales,” she said. “ I wish she, would leave my proceedings 
alone. Poll Ghyll is the family bone of contention at present. 
Yes, I go on with it. I always take a lantern when the night 
is dark, and I know every inch of the ground, and Bob is al¬ 
ways with me ; aren’t you. Bob ? ” 

And she stooped down to pat the colley beside her. Bob 
looked up at her, blinking with a proudly confidential air as 
though to remind her that there were a good many such secrets 
between them. 

“ I like to fancy you with your lantern in the dark,” he cried, 
the hidden emotion piercing through, “ the night-wind blow¬ 
ing about you, the black mountains to the right and left of 
you, some, little stream, perhaps, running beside you for com¬ 
pany, your dog guarding you, and all good angels going 
with you.” 

She flushed still more deeply ; the impetuous words affected 
her strangely. 

“ Don’t fancy it at all,” she said, laughing. ‘‘ It is a very 
small and very natural incident of one’s life here. Look back, 
Mr. Elsmere ; the rain has beaten us.” 

He looked back and saw the great Pike over Shanmoor vil¬ 
lage blotted out in a moving deluge of rain. The quarry op¬ 
posite on the mountain side gleamed green and vivid against the 
ink-black fell; some clothes hanging out in the field below the 
church flapped wildly hither and thither in the sudden gale, 
the only spot of white in the prevailing blackness ; children 
with their petticoats over their heads ran homeward along the 
road the walking party had just quitted ; the stream beneath, 
spreading broadly through the fields, shivered and wrinkled- 
under the blast. Up it came, and the rain mists with it. 
In another minute the storm was beating in their faces. 

“ Caught! ” cried Elsmere, in a voice almost of jubilation. 
‘‘ Let me help you into your cloak. Miss Leyburn.” 

He flung it round her, and struggled into his own mackin¬ 
tosh. The vicar in front of them turned and waved his hand 
to them in laughing despair, then hurried after the others, 
evidently with the view of performing for them the same office 
Elsmere had just performed for Catherine. 

Robert and his companion struggled on for a while in a 
breathless silence against the dejnge, which seemed to beat on 


108 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


them from all sides. He walked boliind her, sheltering her by 
his tall form and his big umbrella as much as he could. His 
pulses were all aglow with the joy of the storm. It seemed to 
him that he rejoiced with the thirsty grass over which the rain 
streams were running, that his heart filled with the shrunken 
becks as the flood leaped along them. Let the elements 
thunder and rave as they pleased. Could he not at a word 
bring the light of that face, those eyes, upon him? Was 
she not his for a moment in the rain and the solitude, as 
he had never been in the commonplace sunshine of their 
valley life ? 

Suddenly he heard an exclamationj and saw her run on in 
front of him. What was the matter ? Then he noticed for 
the first time that Rose, far ahead, was still walking in her 
cotton dress. The little scatterbrain had, of course, forgotten 
her cloak. But, monstrous ! There was Catherine stripping 
off her own. Rose refusing it. In vain. The sister’s deter¬ 
mined arms put it round her. Rose is enwrapped, buttoned 
up before she knows where she is, and Catherine falls back, 
pursued by some shaft from Rose, more sarcastic than grate¬ 
ful, to judge by the tone of it. 

“ Miss Leyburn, what have you been doing ? ” 

“ Rose had forgotten her cloak,” she said briefly. ‘‘ She has 
a very thin dress on, and she is the only one of us who takes 
cold easily.” 

‘‘ You must take my mackintosh,” he said at once. 

She laughed in his face. 

“ As if I should do anything of the sort ? ” 

“ You must,” he said, quietly stripping it off. ‘‘ Do you 
think that you are alwaj^s to be allowed to go through the 
world taking thought of other people and allowing no one to 
take thought for you ? ” 

He held it out to her. 

“ No, no ! This is absurd, Mr. Elsmere. You are not strong 
yet. And I have often told you that nothing hurts me.” 

He hung it deliberately over his arm. “Very well, then, 
there it stays ! ” 

And they hurried on again, she biting her lip and on the 
point of laughter. 

“ Mr. Elsmere, be sensible ! ” she said presently, her look 
changing to one of real distress. “ I should never forgive my¬ 
self if you got a chill after your illness.” 

‘‘ You will not be called upon,” he said, in the most matter- 
of-fact tone. “ Men’s coats are made to k(‘ep out weather,” 
and he pointed to his own, closely buttoned up. “ Your dress 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


109 


—I can’t help being disrespectful under the circumstances— 
will be wet through in ten minutes.” 

Another silence. Then he overtook her. 

“ Please, Miss Leyburn,” he said stopping her. 

There was an instant’s mute contest between them. The 
rain splashed on the umbrellas. She could not help it, she 
broke down into the merriest, most musical laugh of a child 
that can hardly stop itself, and he joined. 

“ Mr. Elsmere, you are ridiculous ! ” 

But she submitted. He put the mackintosh round her, 
thinking, bold man, as she turned her rosy, rain-dewed face 
to him, of Wordsworth’s ^‘Louisa,” and the poet’s cry of 
longing. 

And yet he was not so bold either. Even at this moment 
of exhilaration he was conscious of a bar that checked and 
arrested. Something—what was it ?—drew invisible lines of 
defense about her. A sort of divine fear of her mingled with 
his rising passion. Let him not risk too much too soon. 

They walked on briskly, and were soon on the Whindale 
side of the pass. To the left of them the great hollow of 
High Fell unfolded, storm-beaten and dark, the river issuing 
from the heart of it like an angry voice. 

“ What a change ! ” he said, coming up with her as the 
path widened. “ How impossible that it should have been 
only yesterday afternoon I was lounging up here in the heat, 
by the pool where the stream rises, watching the white but¬ 
terflies on the turf, and reading ‘ Laodamia ! ’ ” 

“ ‘ Laodamia ! ’ ” she said, half sighing as she caught the 
name. “ Is it one of those you like best ? ” 

“ Yes,” he said, bending forward that he might see her in 
spite of the umbrella. “ How superb it is—the roll, the 
majesty of it ; the severe chastened beauty of the main feel¬ 
ing, the individual lines ! ” 

And he quoted line after line, lingering over the cadences. 

“ It was my father’s favorite of all,” she said, in the low, 
vibrating voice of memory. “ He said the last verse to me 
the day before he died.” 

Robert recalled it. 

“Yet tears to human suffering are due, 

And mortal hopes defeated and o’erthrown 
Are mourned by man, and not by man alone 
As fondly we believe.” 

Poor Richard Leyburn ! Yet where had the defeat lain ? 

Was he happy in his school life ? ” he asked, gently. 
‘‘ Was teaching what he liked ? ” 


110 


ROBERT. ELSMERE. 


“ Oh, yes—only—” Catherine paused, and then added, 
hurriedly, as though drawn in spite of herself by the grave 
sympathy of his look, “ I never kneAV anybody so good who 
thought himself of so little account. He alwaj's believed 
that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that 
anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life. 
He was always blaming, scourging himself. And all the 
time he was the noblest, purest, most devoted—” 

She stopped. Her voice had passed beyond her control. 
Elsmere w'as startled by the feeling she showed. Evidently 
he had touched one of the few sore places in this pure heart. 
It was as though her memory of her father had in it elements 
of almost intolerable pathos, as though the child’s brooding 
love and loyalty were in perpetual protest, even now after 
this lapse of years, against the verdict which an overscrupu- 
lous, desponding soul had pronounced upon itself. Did she 
feel that he had gone uncomforted out of life—even by her— 
even by religion ?—was that the sting ? 

“ Oh, I can understand ! ” he said, reverently—“ I can un¬ 
derstand. I have come across it once or twice, that fierce 
self-judgment of the good. It is the most stirring and hum¬ 
bling thing in life.” Then his voice dropped. “ And after 
the last conflict—the last ‘ quailing breath ’— the last on¬ 
slaughts of doubt or fear—think of the Vision waiting—the 
Eternal Comfort : 

“ ‘ Oh, my only Light ! 

It can not be 
That I am he 

On whom Thy tempests fell at night! ’ ” 

The words fell from the softened voice like noble music. 

There was a pause. Then Catherine raised her eyes to his. 
They swam in tears, and yet the unspoken thanks in them 
were radiance itself. It seemed to him as though she came 
closer to him, like a child to an elder who has soothed and 
satisfied an inward smart. 

They walked on in silence. They were just nearing the 
swollen river which roared below them. On the opposite 
bank two umbrellas were vanishing throng the field gate into 
the road, but the vicar had turned and was waiting for them. 
They could see his becloaked figure leaning on his stick 
through the light wreaths of mist that floated above the tum¬ 
bling stream. The abnormally heavy rain had ceased, but 
the clouds seemed to be dragging along the very floor of the 
valley. 

Tlie stepping-stones came in sight. He leaped on the first 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Ill 


and held out his hand to her. When they started she would 
have refused his help with scorn. Now, after a moment’s 
hesitation she yielded, and he felt her dear weight on him as 
he guided her carefully from stone to stone. In reality it is 
both difficult and risky to be helped over stepping-stones. 
You had much better manage for yourself ; and half-way 
through Catharine had a mind to tell him so. But the words 
died on her lips, which smiled instead. He could have wished 
that passage from stone to stone could have lasted forever. 
She was wrapped up grotesquely in his mackintosh ; her hat 
was all bedraggled ; her gloves dripping in his ; and in spite 
of all he could have vowed that anything so lovely as that 
delicately cut, graveh^ smiling face, swaying above the rush¬ 
ing brown water, was never seen in Westmoreland wilds 
before. 

“ It is clearing,” he cried, with ready optimism, as they 
reached the bank. ‘‘ We shall get our picnic to-morrow after 
all—we must get it ! Promise me it shall be fine—and you 
wdll be there ! ” 

The vicar was only fifty yards away, waiting for them 
against the field gate. But Robert held her eagerly, im¬ 
periously—and it seemed to her, her head was still dizzy with 
the water. 

“ Promise ! ” he repeated, his voice dropping. 

She could not stop to think of the absurdity of promising 
for Westmoreland weather. She could only say, faintly, 
“ Yes ! ” and so release her hand. 

“ You are pretty wet ! ” said the vicar, looking from one 
to the other with a curiosity which Robert’s quick sense 
divined at once was directed to something else than the mere 
condition of their garments. But Catherine noticed nothing; 
she walked on wrestling blindly with she knew not what till 
they reached the vicarage gate. There stood Mrs. Thorn¬ 
burgh, the light drizzle into which the rain had declined beat¬ 
ing unheeded on her curls and ample shoulders. She stared 
at Robert’s drenched condition, but he gave her no time to 
make remarks. 

“ Don’t take it off,” he said, with a laughing wave of the 
hand to Catharine ; I will come for it to-morrow morning.” 

And he ran up the drive, conscious at last that it might be 
prudent to get himself into something less sponge-like than 
his present attire as quickly as possible. 

The vicar followed him. 

“ Don’t keep Catharine, my dear. There’s nothing to tell. 
Nobody’s the worse.” 


112 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Mrs. Thornburgh took no heed. Opening the iron gate, she 
went through it on to the deserted rain-beaten road, laid both 
her hands on Catherine’s shoulders, and looked her straight 
in the eyes. The vicar’s anxious hint was useless. She could 
contain herself no longer. She had watched them from the 
vicarage come down the fell together, had seen them cross 
the stepping-stones, lingeringly, hand in hand. 

“My dear Catherine ! ” she cried, elfusively kissing Cathe¬ 
rine’s glowing cheek under the shelter of the lauristinus that 
made a bower of the gate. “ My dear Catherine ! ” 

Catherine gazed at her in astonishment. Mrs. Thornburgh’s 
eyes were all alive, and swarming with questions. If it had 
been Rose she would have let them out in one fell flight. But 
Catherine’s personality kept her in awe. And after a second, 
as the two stood together, a deep flush rose on Catherine’s 
face, and an expression of half-frightened apology dawned in 
Mrs. Thornburgh’s. 

Catherine drew herself away. “ Will you please give Mr. 
Elsmere his mackintosh?” she said, taking it off ; “I shan’t 
want it this little way.” 

And putting it on Mrs. Thornburgh’s arm she turned away, 
walking quickly round the bend of the road. 

Mrs. Thornburgh watched her open-mouthed, and moved 
slowly back to the house in a state of complete collapse. 

“ I always knew ”—she said, with a groan—“ I always 
knew it would never go right if it was Catherine ! Why was 
it Catherine ? ” 

And she went in, still hurling at Providence the same vin¬ 
dictive query. 

Meanwhile Catherine, hurrying home, the receding flush 
leaving a sudden pallor behind "it, was twisting her hands 
before her in a kind of agony. 

“ What have I been doing ? ” she said to herself. “ What 
have I been doing ? ” 

At the gate of Burwood something made her look up. She 
saw the girls in their own room—Agnes was standing behind, 
Rose had evidently rushed forward to see Catherine come 
in, and now retreated as suddenly when she saw her sister 
look up. 

Catherine understood it all in an instant. “They, too, are 
on the watch,” she thought to herself, bitterly. The strong, 
reticent nature was outraged by the perception that she hjS 
been for dajH the unconscious actor in a drama of which her 
sisters and Mrs. Thornburgh had been the silent and intelli¬ 
gent spectators. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


113 


She came down presently from her room, very white and 
quiet, admitted that she was tired, and said nothing to any¬ 
body. Agnes and Rose noticed the change at once, whispered 
to each other when they found an opportunity, and fore¬ 
boded ill. 

After their tea-supper, Catherine, unperceived, slipped out 
of the little lane gate, and climbed the stony path above the 
house leading on to the fell. The rain had ceased, but the 
clouds hung low and threatening, and the close air was satu¬ 
rated with moisture. As she gained the bare fell, sounds of 
water met her on all sides. The river cried hoarsely to her 
from below, the becks in the little ghylls w^ere full and thun¬ 
derous ; and beside her over the smooth grass slid many a 
new-born rivulet, the child of the storm, and destined to 
vanish with the night. Catherine’s soul went out to welcome 
the gray damp of the hills. She knew them best in this mood. 
They were thus most her own. 

She climbed on till at last she reached the crest of the 
ridge. Behind her lay the valley, and on its further side the 
fells she had crossed in the afternoon. Before her spread a 
long green vale, compared to which Whindale, with its white 
road, its church, and parsonage, and scattered houses, was the 
great world itself. Marrisdale had no road and not a single 
house. As Catherine descended into it she saw not a sign of 
human life. There were sheep grazing in the silence of the 
long June twilight ; the blackish walls ran down and up 
again, dividing the green hollow with melancholy uniformity. 
Here and there was a sheepfold, suggesting the bleakness of 
winter nights ; and here and there a rough stone barn for 
storing fodder. And beyond the vale, eastward and north¬ 
ward, Catherine looked out upon a wild sea of moors wrapped 
in mists, sullen and storm-beaten, while to the left the clouds 
hung deepest and inkiest over the high points of the Ulls 
water mountains. 

When she was once below the pass, man and his world 
were shut out. The girl figure in the blue cloak and hood 
was absolutely alone. She descended till she reached a point 
where a little stream had been turned into a stone trough for 
cattle. Above it stood a gnarled and solitary thorn. Cather¬ 
ine sank down on a rock at the foot of the tree. It was a 
•seat she knew well; she had lingered there with her father ; 
she had thought and prayed there as girl and woman ; she 
had wrestled there often with despondency or grief, or some 
of those subtle spiritual temptations which were all her pure 
youth had known, till the inner light had dawned again, and 


114 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


tlie humble enraptured soul could almost have traced amid the 
shadows of that dappled moorland world, between her and 
the clouds, the white stoles and “ sleeping wings ” of minis¬ 
tering spirits. 

But no wrestle had ever been so hard as this. And with 
what fierce suddenness had it come upon her ! She looked 
back over the day with bewilderment. She could see dimly 
that the Catherine who had started on that Shanmoor walk 
had been full of vague misgivings other than those concerned 
with a few neglected duties. There had been an undefined 
sense of unrest, of difference, of broken equilibrium. She 
had shown it in the way in which at first she had tried to keep 
herself and Robert Elsmere apart. 

And then—beyond the departure from Shanmoor she 
seemed to lose the thread of her own history. Memory was 
drowned in a feeling to which the resisting soul as yet would 
give no name. She laid her head on her knees trembling. 
She heard again the sweet, imperious tones with which he 
broke down her opposition about the cloak ; she felt again 
the grasp of his steadying hand on hers. 

But it was only for a very few minutes that she drifted 
thus. She raised her head again, scourging herself in shame 
and self reproach, recapturing the empire-of the soul with a 
strong effort. She set herself to a stern analysis of the whole 
situation. Clearly, Mrs. Thornburgh and her sisters had been 
aware for some indefinite time that Mr. Elsmere had been 
showing a peculiar interest in her. Their eyes had been open. 
She realized now with hot cheeks how many meetings and 
tete-d-tetes had been managed for her and Elsmere, and how 
complacently she had fallen into Mrs. Thornburgh’s snares. 

“ Have I encouraged him ? ” she asked herself sternly. 

“ Yes,” cried the smarting conscience. 

“ Can I marry him ? ” 

“ No,” said conscience again ; “ not without deserting your 
post, not without betraying your trust.” 

What post ? What trust ? Ah, conscience was ready 
enough with the answer. Was it not just ten years since, as 
a girl of sixteen, prematurely old and thoughtful, she had sat 
beside her father’s deathbed, while her delicate hysterical 
mother, in a state of utter collapse, was kept away from him 
by the doctors ? She could see the drawn face, the restless, 
melancholy eyes. “ Catherine, my darling, you are the strong 
one. They will look to you. Support them.” And she 
could see in imagination her own young face pressed against 
the pillows. ‘‘ Yes, father, always—always ! ”—“ Catherine, 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


115 


life is harder, the narrow way narrower than ever. I die ”— 
and memory caught still the piteous, long-drawn breath by 
which the voice was broken—“ in much—much perplexity 
about many things. You have a clear soul, an iron will. 
Strengthen the others. Bring them safe to the day of ac¬ 
count.” “ Yes, father, with God’s help. Oh, with God’s help ! ” 

That long-past dialogue is clear and sharp to her now, as 
though it were spoken afresh in her ears. And how has she 
kept her pledge ? She looks back humbly on her life of inces¬ 
sant devotion, on the time of long dependence wdiich has 
bound her to her weak and widowed mother, on her relations 
to her sisters, the efforts she has made to train them in the 
spirit of her father’s life and beliefs. 

Have those efforts reached their term ? Can it be said in 
any sense that her work is done, her promise kept ? 

“ Oh, no—no ! ” she cries to herself with vehemence. Her 
mother depends on her every day and hour for protection, 
comfort, enjoyment. The girls are at the opening of life— 
Agnes twenty. Rose eighteen, with all experience to come. 
And Rose—Ah ! at the thought of Rose, Catharine’s heart 
sinks deeper and deeper—she feels a culprit before her father’s 
memory. What is it has gone so desperately wrong with her 
training of the child ! Surely she has given love enough, 
anxious thought enough, and here is Rose only fighting to be 
free from the yoke of her father’s wishes, from the galling 
pressure of the family tradition ! 

No. Her task has just now reached its most difficult, 
its most critical moment. How can she leave it ! Impossible. 

What claim can she put against these supreme claims—of 
her promise, her mother’s and sisters’ need ? 

His claim ? Oh, no—no ! She admits with soreness and 
humiliation unspeakable that she has done him wrong. If he 
loves her she has opened the way thereto ; she confesses in her 
scrupulous honesty that when the inevitable withdrawal comes 
she will have given him cause to think of her hardly, slight¬ 
ingly. She flinches painfully under the thought. But it does 
not alter the matter. This girl, brought up in the austerest 
school of Christian self-government, knows nothing of the 
divine rights of passion. Half modern literature is based 
upon them. Catharine Leyburn know of no supreme right 
but the right of God to the obedience of man. 

Oh, and besides—besides—it is impossible that he should 
care so very much. The time is so short—there is so little in 
her, comparatively, to attract a man of such resource, such 
attainments, such access to the best things of life. 


116 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


She can not—in a kind of terror—she will not, believe in her 
own love-worthiness, in her own power to deal a lasting 
wound. 

Then her own claim? Has she any claim, has the poor 
bounding heart that she can not silence, do what she will, 
through all this strenuous debate, no claim to satisfaction, 
to joy ? 

She locks her hands round her knees, conscious, poor soul, 
that the worst struggle is here, the quickest agony here. But 
she does not waver for an instant. And all her weapons are 
ready. The inmost soul of her is a fortress well stored, whence 
at any moment the more personal craving of the natural man- 
can be met, repulsed, and slain. 

3Ian approacheth so much the nearer unto God the fur¬ 
ther he departeth from all earthly comfort.'‘'‘ 

If thou couldst perfectly amnhilate thyself and empty 
thyself of all created lone, then should I be constrained to flow 
tnto thee with greater abunda7ice of grace."'’’ 

“ Wimi thou lookest imto the creature the sight of the Cre¬ 
ator is withdrawn from thee."’"’ 

“ Learn m all things to overcome thyself for the love of thy 
Creator. . . . ” 

She presses the sentence she has so often meditated in her 
long solitary walks about the mountains into her heart. And 
one fragment of George Herbert especially rings in her ears, 
solemnly, funereally— 

“ Thy Saviour sentenced joy ! ” 

Ay, sentenced it forever—the personal craving, the selfish 
need, that must be filled at any cost. In the silence of the 
descending night Catherine quietly, with tears, carried out 
that sentence, and slew her young new-boi*n joy at the feet of 
the Master. 

She stayed where she was for a while after this crisis in a 
kind of bewilderment and stupoi*, but maintaining a perfect 
outward tranquillity. Then there was a curious little 
epilogue. 

“ It is all over,” she said to herself, tenderly. “ But he has 
taught me so much—he has been so good to me— he is so 
good ! Let me take to my heart some counsel—some word of 
his, and obey it sacredly—silently—for these days’ sake.” 

Then she fell thinking again, and she remembered their 
talk about Rose. How often she had pondered it since ! In 
this intense trance of feeling it breaks upon her finally that 
he is right. May it not be that he with his clearer thought, 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


117 


his wider knowledge of life, has laid his finger on the weak 
point in her guardianship of her sisters? “I have tried to 
stifle her passion,” she thought, “ to push it out of the way 
as a hindrance. Ought I not rather to have taught her to 
make of it a step in the ladder—to have moved her to bring 
her gifts to the altar ? Oh, let me take his word for it—be 
ruled by him in this one thing, once ! ” 

She bowed her face on her knees again. It seemed to her 
that she had thrown herself at Elsm^re’s feet, that her cheek 
was pressed against that young brown hand of his. How 
long the moment lasted she never knew. When at last she 
rose, stiff and weary, darkness was overtaking even the linger¬ 
ing northern twilight. The angry clouds had dropped lower 
on the moors ; a few sheep beside the glimmering stone 
trough showed dimly white ; the night wind was sighing 
through the untenanted valley and the scanty branches of the 
thorn. White mists lay along the hollow of the dale ; they 
moved weirdly under the breeze. She could have fancied 
them a troop of wraiths to whom she had flung her warm 
crushed heart, and who were bearing it away for burial. 

As she came slowly over the pass and down the Whindale 
side of the fell a clear purpose was^in her mind. Agnes had 
talked to her only that morning of Rose and Rose’s desire, 
and she had received the news with her habitual silence. 

The house was lighted up when she returned. Her mother 
had gone upstairs. Catherine went to her, but even Mrs. 
Leyburn discovered that she looked worn out, and she was 
sent off to bed. She went along the passage quickly to Rose’s 
room, listening a moment at the door. Yes, Rose was inside, 
crooning some German song, and apparently alone. She 
knocked and went in. 

Rose was sitting on the edge of her bed, a white dressing- 
gown over her shoulders, her hair in a glorious confusion all 
about her. She was swaying backward and forward dreamily 
singing, and she started up when she saw Catherine. 

“ Roschen,” said the elder sister, going uj) to her with a 
tremor of heart, and putting her motherly arms round the 
curly golden hair and the half-covered shoulders, “ you never 
told me of that letter from Manchester, but Agnes did. Did 
you think, Roschen, I would never let you have your way ? 
Oh, I am not so hard! I may have been wrong—I think I 
have been wrong ; you shall do what you will, Roschen. If 
you want to go I will ask mother.” 

Rose, pushing herself away with one hand, stood staring. 
She was struck dumb by this sudden breaking-down of 


118 


ROBERT ELSMERE, 


Catherine’s long resistance. And what a strange wdiite 
Catherine ! What did it mean ? Catherine withdrew her 
arms with a little sigh and moved away. 

“ I just came to tell you that, Roschen,” she said, “ but I 
am very tired and must not stay.” 

Catherine “ very tired ! ” Rose thought the skies must be 
falling. 

‘‘ Cathie ! ” she cried, leaping forward just as her sister 
gained the door. “ Ohj, Cathie, you are an angel, and I am a 
nasty, odious little wretch. But oh, tell me, what is the 
matter ? ” 

And she flung her strong young arms round Catherine with 
a passionate strength. 

The elder sister struggled to release herself. 

“ Let me go. Rose,” she said in a low voice. ‘‘ Oh, you 
must let me go ! ” 

And wrenching herself free she drew her hands over her 
eyes as though trying to drive away the mist from them. 

“ Good-night !. Sleep well.” 

And she disappeared, shutting the door noiselessly after 
her. Rose stood staring a moment, and then swept off her 
feet by a flood of many feelings—remorse, love, fear, sym¬ 
pathy—threw herself face downward on her bed and burst 
into a passion of tears. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Cathekine was much perplexed as to how she was to carry 
out her resolution ; she pondered over it through much of the 
night. She was painfully anxious to make Elsmere under¬ 
stand without a scene, without a definite proposal and a 
definite rejection. It was no use letting things drift. Some¬ 
thing brusque and marked there must be. She quietly made 
her dispositions. 

It was long after the gray, vaporous morning stole on the 
hills before she fell lightly, restlessly asleep. To her health¬ 
ful youth a sleepless night was almost unknown. She won¬ 
dered through the long hours of it, whether now, like other 
women, she had had her story, passed through her one supreme 
moment, and she thought of one or two worthy old maids she 
knew in the neighborhood with a new and curious pity. Had 
any of them, too, gone down into Marrisdale and come up 
widowed, indeed ? 

All through, no doubt, there was a certain melancholy pride 
in her own spiritual strength. “ It was not mine,” she would 


RaBERT ELSMERE. 


119 


have said, with perfect sincerity,‘‘hut God’s.” Still, what¬ 
ever its source, it had been there at command, and the reflec¬ 
tion carried with it a sad sense of security. It was as though 
a soldier after his first skirmish should congratulate himself 
on being bullet-proof. 

To be sure, there was an intense trouble and disquiet in the 
thought that she and Mr. Elsmere must meet again, prob¬ 
ably many times. The period of his original invitation had 
been warmly extended by the Thornburghs. She believed he 
meant to stay another week or ten days in the valley. But in 
the spiritual exaltation of the night she felt herself equal to 
any conflict, any endurance, and she fell asleep, the hands 
clasped on her breast expressing a kind of resolute patience, 
like those of some old sepulchral monument. 

The following morning Elsmere examined the clouds and 
the barometer with abnormal interest. The day was sunless 
and lowering, but not raining, and he represented to Mrs. 
Thornburgh, with a hypocritical assumption of the practical 
man, that with rugs and mackintoshes it was possible to pic¬ 
nic on the dampest grass. But he could not make out the 
vicar’s wife. She was all sighs and flightiness. She “ sup¬ 
posed they could go,” and “ and didn’t see what good it would 
do them”; she had twenty dilferent views, and all of them 
more or less mixed up with pettishness, as to the best place 
for a picnic on a gray day ; and at last she grew so difficult 
that Robert suspected something desperately wrong with the 
household, and withdrew lest male guests might be in the 
way. Then she pursued him into the study and thrust a 
“ Spectator ” into his hands, begging him to convey it to Bur- 
wood. She asked it lugubriously with many sighs, her cap 
much askew. Robert could have kissed her, curls and all, one 
moment for suggesting the errand, and the next could almost 
have signed her committal to the county lunatic asylum with 
a clear conscience. What an extraordinary person it was ! 

Off he went, however, with his “ Spectator ” under his arm, 
whistling. Mrs. Thornburgh caught the sounds through an 
open window, and tore the flannel across she was preparing 
for a mothers’ meeting with a noise like the rattle of mus-^ 
ketry. Whistling ! She would like to know what grounds* 
he had for it, indeed ! She always knew—she always said, 
and she would go on saying—that Catherine Leyburn would 
die an old maid. 

Meanwhile Robert had strolled across to Burwood with the 
lightest heart. By way of keeping all his anticipations within 
the bounds of strict reason, he told himself that it was impos- 


120 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


sible he should see “ her ” in the morning. She was always 
busy in the morning. 

He approached the house as a Catholic might approach a 
shrine. That was her window, that upper casement with the 
little banksia rose twining round it. One night, when he and 
the vicar had been out late on the hills, he had seen a light 
streaming from it across the valley, and had thought how the 
mistress of the maiden solitude within shone “ in a naughty 
world.” 

In the drive he met Mrs. Leyburn, who was strolling about 
the garden. She at once informed him with much languid 
plaintiveness that Catherine had gone to Whinborough for 
the day, and would not be able to join the picnic. 

Elsmere stood still. 

‘‘ Gone! ” he cried. ‘‘ But it was all arranged with her 
yesterday''.” Mrs. Leyburn shrugged her shoulders. She, too, 
was evidently much put out. 

“So I told her. But you know, Mr. Elsmere”—and the 
gentle widow dropped her voice as though communicating a 
secret—“ when Catherine’s once made up her mind, you may 
as well try to dig away High Fell as move her. She asked 
me to tell Mrs. Thornburgh—will you, please ?—that she found 
it was her day for the orphan asylum, and one or two other 
pieces of business, and she must go.” 

Mrs. Thornburgh!'''^ And not a word for him—for him 
to whom she had given her promise ? She had gone to Whin- 
borough to avoid him, and she had gone in the brusquest way, 
that it might be unmistakable. 

The young man stood with his hands thrust into the pock¬ 
ets of his long coat, hearing with half an ear the remarks that 
Mrs. Leyburn was making to him about the picnic. Was the 
wretched thing to come off after all ? 

He was too proud and sore to suggest an alternative. But 
Mrs. Thornburgh managed that for him. When he got back 
he told the vicar in the hall of Miss Leyburn’s flight in the 
fewest possible words, and then his long legs vanished up the 
stairs in a twinkling, and the door of his room shut behind 
him. A few minutes afterward Mrs. Thornburgh’s shrill 
voice was heard in the hall calling to the servant: 

“ Sarah, let the hamper alone. Take out the chickens.” 

And a minute after the vicar came up to his door: 

“ Elsmere, Mrs. Thornburgh thinks the day is too uncertain ; 
better put it off.” 

To which Elsmere from inside replied with a vigorous 
assent. The vicar slowly descended to tackle his spouse, who 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


121 


seemed to have established herself for the morning in his 
sanctum, though the parish accounts were clamoring to be 
done, and this morning in the week belonged to them by im¬ 
memorial usage. 

But Mrs. Thornburgh was unmanageable. She sat opposite 
to him with one hand on each knee, solemnly demanding of 
him if he knew what was to be done with young women now¬ 
adays, because she didn’t. 

The tormented vicar declined to be drawn into so illim¬ 
itable a subject, recommended patience, declared that it might 
be all a mistake, and tried hard to absorb himself in the con¬ 
sideration of 2s. plus 2s. lid. minus 9d. 

“ And I suppose, William,” said his wife to him at last, with 
withering sarcasm, “ that you’d sit by and see Catherine break 
that young man’s heart, and send him back to his mother no 
better than he came here, in spite of all the beef-tea and jelly 
Sarah and I have been putting into him, and never lift a lin¬ 
ger. You’d see his life blasted and you’d do nothing—noth¬ 
ing, I suppose.” 

And she fixed him with a fiercely interrogative eye. 

“ Of course,” cried the vicar, roused ; “ I should think so. 
What good did an outsider ever get by meddling in a love 
affair ? Take care of yourself, Emma. If the girl doesn’t 
care for him, you can’t make her.” 

The vicar’s wife rose, the upturned corners of her mouth 
saying unutterable things. 

‘‘ Doesn’t care for him ! ” she echoed, in a tone which im¬ 
plied that her husband’s head-piece was past praying for. 

“ Yes, doesn’t care for him! ” said the vicar, nettled. 

What else should make her give him a snub like this ? ” 

Mrs. Thornburgh looked at him again with exasperation. 
Then a curious expression stole into her eyes. 

Oh, the Lord only knows ! ” she said, with a hasty free¬ 
dom of speech which left the vicar feeling decidedly uncom¬ 
fortable as she shut the door after her. 

However, if the Higher Powers alone Jcneio, Mrs. Thorn¬ 
burgh was convinced that she could make a very shrewd 
guess at the causes of Catherine’s behavior. In her opinion it 
was all pure “ cussedness.” Catherine Leyburn had always 
conducted her life on principles entirely different from those 
of other people. Mrs. Thornburgh wholly denied, as she sat 
bridling by herself, that it was a Christian necessity to make 
yourself and other people uncomfortable. Yet this was what 
this perverse young woman was always doing. Here was a 
charming young man who had fallen in love with her at first 


122 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


siglit, and had done his best to make the fact plain to her in 
the most chivalrous devoted ways. Catherine encourages 
him, walks with him, talks with him, is for a whole three 
weeks more gay and cheerful and more like other girls than 
she has ever been known to be, and then, at the end of it, 
just , when everybody is breathlessly awaiting the natural 
denouement^ goes off to spend the day that should have been 
the day of her betrothal in pottering about orphan asylums, 
leaving everybody, but especially the poor young man, to look 
ridiculous ! No, Mrs. Thornburgh had no patience with her— 
none at all. It was all because she would not be happy like 
anj^body else, but must needs set herself up to be peculiar. 
Why not live on a pillar, and go into hair-shirts at once? 
Then the rest of the world would know what to be at. 

Meanwhile Rose was in no small excitement. While her 
mother and Elsmere had been talking in the garden, she had 
been discreetly waiting in the back behind the angle of the 
house, and when she saw Elsmere walk off she followed him 
with eager, sympathetic eyes. 

“ Poor fellow ! ” she said to herself, but this time with the' 
little tone of patronage which a girl of eighteen, conscious 
of graces and good looks, never shrinks from assuming toward 
an elder male, especially a male in love with some one else. 
‘‘I wonder whether he thinks he knows anything about 
Catherine?” 

But her own feeling to-day was very soft and complex. 
Yesterday it had been all hot rebellion. To-day it was all 
remorse and wondering curiosity. What had brought Cath¬ 
erine into her room, with that white face, and that bewilder¬ 
ing change of policy? What had made her do this brusque, 
discourteous thing to-day ? Rose, having been delaj^ed by 
the loss of one of her goloshes in a bog, had been once near 
her and Elsmere during that dripping descent from Shanmoor. 
They had been so clearly absorbed in one another that she ' 
had fled on guiltily to Agnes, golosh in hand, without waiting 
to put it on ; confident, however, that neither Elsmere nor 
Catherine had been aware of her little adventure. And at 
the Shanmoor tea Catherine herself had discussed the picnic, 
offering, in fact, to guide the party to a particular ghyll in 
High Fell, better known to her than any one else. 

“ Oh, of course it’s our salvation in this world and the next 
that’s in the way,’’ thought Rose, sitting crouched up in a 
grassy nook in the garden, her shoulders up to her ears, her 
chin in her hands. “I wish to goodness Catherine wouldn’t 
think so much about mine, at any rate. I hate,” added this 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


123 


incorrigible young pereon—“ I hate being the third part of 
a ‘ moral obstacle ’ against my will. I declare I don’t believe 
we should any of us go to perdition even if Catherine did 
marry. And what a wretch I am to think so after last night ! 
Oh, dear, I wish she’d let me do something for her ; I wish 
she’d ask me to black her boots for her, or put in her tuckers, 
or tidy her drawers for her, or anything worse still, and I’ll 
do it and welcome ! ” 

It was getting uncomfortably serious all round. Rose ad¬ 
mitted. But there was one element of comedy besides Mrs. 
Thornburgh, and that was Mrs. Leyburn’s unconsciousness. 

‘‘ Mamma is too good,” thought the girl, with a little ripple 
of laughter. “ She takes it as a matter of course that all 
the world should admire us, and she’d scorn to believe that 
anybody did it from interested motives.” 

Which was perfectly true. Mrs. Leyburn was too devoted 
to her daughters to feel any fidgety interest in their mar¬ 
rying. Of course the most eligible persons would be only 
too thankful to marry them when the moment came. Mean¬ 
while her devotion was in no need of the confirming testimony 
of lovers. It was sufficient in itself, and kept her mind 
gently occupied from morning till night. If it had occurred 
to her to notice that Robert Elsmere had been paying special 
attentions to any one in the family, she would have suggested 
with perfect naivete that it was herself. For he had been to 
her the very pink of courtesy and consideration, and she was 
of opinion that “ poor Richard’s views ” of the degeneracy 
of Oxford men would have been modified could he have seen 
this particular specimen. 

Later on in the morning Rose had been out giving Bob a 
run, while Agnes drove with her mother. On the way home 
she overtook Elsmere returning from an errand for the vicar. 

“ It is not so bad,” she said to him, laughing, pointing to 
the sky ; “ we really might have gone.” 

“ Oil, it would have been cheerless,” he said simply. His 
look of depression amazed her. She felt a quick movement 
of sympathy, a wild wish to bid him cheer up and fight it 
out. If she could just have shown him Catherine as she 
looked last night ? Why couldn’t she talk it out with him ? 
Absurd conventions ! She had half a mind to try. 

But the grave look of the man beside her deterred even her 
young half-childish audacity. 

‘‘ Catherine will have a good day for all her business,” she 
said, carelessly. 

He assented quietly. Oh, after that hand-shake on the 


124 


llOBFAiT ELSMERE. 


bridge yesterday she could not stand it—she must give him a 
hint how the land lay. 

“ I suppose she will spend the afternoon with Aunt Ellen. 
Mr. Elsmere, what did you think of Aunt Ellen ? ” 

Elsmere started, and could not help smiling into the young 
girl’s beautiful eyes, which were radiant with fun. 

“ A most estimable person,” he said. “ Are you on good 
terms with her. Miss Rose ? ” 

‘‘Oh, dear, no !” she said, with a little face. “I’m not a 
Leyburn ; I wear aesthetic dresses, and Aunt Ellen has 
‘ special leadings of the spirit ’ to the effect that the violin is 
a soul-destroying instrument. Oh, dear !—and the girl’s 
mouth twisted—“ is’s alarming to think, if Catherine hadn’t 
been Catherine, how like Aunt Ellen she might have been ! ” 

She flashed a mischievous look at him, and thrilled as she 
caught the sudden change of expression in his face. 

“ Your sister has the Westmoreland strength in her—one 
can see that,” he said, evidently speaking with some difliculty. 

“ Strength ! Oh, yes. Catherine has plenty of strength,” 
cried Rose, and then was silent a moment. “ You know, Mr. 
Elsmere,” she went on at last, obeying some inward impulse— 
“ or perhaps you don’t know—that, at home, we are all Cath¬ 
erine’s creatures. She does exactly what she likes with us. 
When my father died she was sixteen, Agnes was ten, I was 
eight. We came here to live—we were not very rich, of 
course, and mamma wasn’t strong. Well, she did everything ; 
she taught us—we have scarcely had any teacher but her 
since then ; she did most of the housekeeping ; and you can 
see for yourself what she does for the neighbors and poor 
folk. She is never ill, she is never idle, she always knows 
her own mind. We owe everything we are, almost every¬ 
thing we have, to her. Her nursing has kept mamma alive 
through one or two illnesses. Our lawyer says he never knew 
any business affairs better managed than ours, and Catherine 
manages them. The one thing she never takes any care or 
thought for is herself. What we should do without her I 
can’t imagine ; and yet sometimes I think if it goes on much 
longer none of us three will have any character of our own 
left. After all, you know, it may be good for the weak peo¬ 
ple to struggle on their own feet, if the strong would only 
believe it, instead of always being carried. The strong peo¬ 
ple neednH be always trampling on themselves—if they only 
knew—” 

She stopped abi’uptly, flushing scarlet over her own daring. 
Her eyes were feverishly bright, and her voice vibrated under 


ROBERT ELSMERB. 


125 


a strange mixture of feelings—sympathy, reverence, and a 
passionate inner admiration struggling with rebellion and 
protest. 

They had reached the gate of the vicarage. Elsmere 
stopped and looked at his companion with a singular lighten¬ 
ing of expression. He saw perfectly that the young impet¬ 
uous creature understood him, that she felt his cause was not 
prospering, and that she wanted to help him. He saw that 
what she meant by this picture of their common life was that 
no one need expect Catherine Leyburn to be an easy prey ; 
that she wanted to impress on him in her eager way that 
such lives as her sister’s were not to be gathered at a 
touch, without difficulty, from the branch that bears them. 
She was exhorting him to courage—nay, he caught more than 
exhortation—a sort of secret message from her bright, excited 
looks and incoherent speech that made his heart leap. But 
pride and delicacy forbade him to put his feeling into words. 

“ You don’t hope to persuade me that your sister reckons 
you among the weak persons of the world ? ” he said, laugh¬ 
ing, his hand on the gate. Rose could have blessed him for 
thus turning the conversation. What on earth could she 
have said next ? 

She stood bantering a little longer, and then ran off with 
Bob. 

Elsmere passed the rest of the morning wandering medita¬ 
tively over the cloudj'' fells. After all he was only where he 
was, before the blessed madness, the upflooding hope, nay, 
almost certainty, of yesterday. His attack had been for the 
moment repulsed. He gathered from Rose’s manner that 
Catherine’s action with regard to the picnic had not been 
unmeaning nor accidental, as on second thoughts he had been 
half trying to persuade himself. Evidently those about her 
felt it to be ominous. Well, then, at worst, when they met 
they would meet on a different footing, with a sense of some¬ 
thing critical between them. Oh, if he did but know a little 
more clearly how he stood ! He spent a noonday hour on a 
gray rock on the side of the fell between Whindale and Mar- 
risdale, stud 3 dng the path opposite, the stepping-stones, the 
bit of white road. The minutes passed in a kind of trance of 
memory. Oh, that soft, child-like movement to him, after 
his speech about her father ! that heavenly yielding and self- 
forgetfulness which shone in her every look and movement 
as she stood balancing on the stepping-stones ! If after all 
she should j^rove cruel to him, would he not have a legitimate 
grievance, a heavy charge to fling against her maiden gen- 


126 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


tleness ? He trampled on the notion. Let her do with him 
as she would, she would be his saint always, unquestioned, 
unarraigned. 

But with such a memory in his mind it was impossible that 
any man, least of all a man of Elsmere’s temperament, could 
be very hopeless. Oh, yes, he had been rash, foolhardy. Do 
such divine creatures stoop to mortal men as easily as he had 
dreamed ? He recognizes all the difficulties, he enters into 
the force of all the ties that bind her—or imagines that he 
does. But he is a man and her lover ; and if she loves him 
in the end love will conquer—must conquer. For his more 
modern sense, deeply Christianized as it is, assumes almost 
without argument the sacredness of passion and its claim— 
wherein a vast difference between himself and that solitary 
wrestler in Marrisdale. 

Meanwhile he kept all his hopes and fears to himself. Mrs. 
Thornburgh was dying to talk to him ; but though his mobile, 
boyish temperament made it impossible for him to disguise 
his change of mood, there was in him a certain natural dignity 
which life greatly developed, but which made it alwaj^-s possi¬ 
ble for him to hold his own against curiosity and indiscretion. 
Mrs. Thornburgh had to hold her peace. As for the vicar, he 
developed what were for him a surprising number of new top¬ 
ics of conversation, and in the late afternoon took Elsmere a 
run up the fells to the nearest fragment of the Roman road 
which runs, with such magnificent disregard of the humors of 
Mother Earth, over the very top of High Street toward Pen¬ 
rith and Carlisle. 

Next day it looked as though, after many waverings, the 
characteristic Westmoreland weather had descended upon 
them in good earnest. From early morn till late in the even¬ 
ing the valley was wrapped in damp clouds or moving rain, 
which swept down from the west through the great basin of 
the hills, and rolled along the course of the river, wrapping 
trees and fells and houses in the same misty, cheerless drizzle. 
Under the outward pall of rain, indeed, the valley was renew¬ 
ing its summer youth ; the river was swelling with an impetu¬ 
ous music through all its dwindled channels ; the crags flung 
out white waterfalls again, which the heat had almost dried 
away ; and by noon the whole green hollow Avas vocal with 
the sounds of water—water dashing and foaming in the river, 
water leaping downward from the rocks, Avater dripping steadi- 
Ij from the larches and sycamores and the slate eaA^es of the 
houses. 

Elsmere sat in-doors reading up the history of the parish 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


127 


system of Surrey, or pretending to do so. He sat in a corner 
of the study, where he and the vicar protected each other 
against Mrs. Thornburgh. That good woman would open the 
door once and again in the morning, and put her head through 
in search of prey ; but on being confronted with two studi¬ 
ous men instead of one, each buried to the ears in folios, she 
would give vent to an irritable cough and retire discomfited. 
In reality Elsmere was thinking of nothing in the world but 
what Catherine Leyburn might be doing that morning. Judg¬ 
ing a north countrywoman by the pusillanimous southern 
standard, he found himself glorying in the weather. She could 
not wander far from him to-day. 

After the early dinner he escaped, just as the vicar’s wife 
was devising an excuse on which to convey both him and her¬ 
self to Burwood, and sallied forth with a mackintosh for a 
rush down the Whinborough road. It was still raining, but 
the clouds showed a momentary lightening, and a few gleams 
of watery sunshine brought out every now and then that 
sparkle on the trees, that iridescent beauty of distance and 
atmosphere which goes so far to make a sensitive spectator 
forget the petulant abundance of mountain rain. Elsmere 
passed Burwood with a thrill. Should he or should he not 
present himself ? Let him push on a bit and think. So on he 
swung, measuring his tall frame against the gusts, spirits and 
masculine energy rising higher with every step. At last the 
passion of his mood had wrestled itself out with the weather, 
and he turned back, once more determined to seek and find 
her, to face his fortunes like a man. The warm rain beating 
from the west struck on his uplifted face. He welcomed it as 
a friend. Rain and storm had opened to him the gates of a 
spiritual citadel. What could ever wholly close it against him 
any more ? He felt so strong, so confident ! Patience and 
courage ! 

Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming 
out from the white mists surging round it. A shaft of sun- 
liglit lay across its upper end, and he caught a marvelous ap¬ 
parition of a sunlighted valley hung in air, a pale strip of blue 
above, a white thread of stream wavering through it, and all 
around it and below it the rolling rain-clouds. 

Suddenly between him and that enchanter’s vision he saw a 
dark slim figure against tlie mists, walking before him along 
the road. It was Catherine—Catherine just emerged from a 
foot-path across the fields, battling with wind and rain, and 
quite unconscious of any spectator. Oh, what a sudden thrill 
was that ! what a leaping together of joy and dread, which 


128 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


sent the blood to his heart ! Alone—they two alone again— 
in the wild Westmoreland mists, and half a mile at least of 
winding road between them and Burwood. He flew after 
her, dreading, and yet longing for the moment when he should 
meet her eyes. Fortune had suddenly given this hour into 
his hands ; he felt it open upon him like that mystic valley in 
the clouds. 

Catherine heard the hurrying steps behind her and turned. 
There was an evident start when she caught sight of her pur¬ 
suer—a quick change of expression. She wore a close-fitting 
water-proof dress and cap. Her hair was lightly loosened, 
her cheek freshened by the storm. He came up with her ; 
he took her hand, his eyes dancing with the joy he could 
not hide. 

“ What are you made of, I wonder ! ” he said gayly. 

“ Nothing, certainly, that minds weather.” 

“No Westmoreland native thinks of staying at home for 
this,” she said, with her quiet smile, moving on beside him as 
she spoke. 

He looked down upon her with an indescribable mixture of 
feelings. No stilfness, no coldness in her manner—only the 
even gentleness which always marked her out from others. 
He felt as though yesterday were blotted out, and would not 
for worlds have recalled it to her or rejDroached her with it. 
Let it be as though they were but carrying on the scene of 
the stepping-stones. 

“ Look,” he said, pointing to the west; “ have you been 
watching that magical break in the clouds ? ” 

Her eyes followed his to the delicate picture hung high 
among the moving mists. 

“ Ah,” she exclaimed, her face kindling, “ that is one of our 
loveliest effects, and one of the rarest. You are lucky to have 
seen it.” 

“ I am conceited enough,” he said joyously, “ to feel as if 
some enchanter were at work up there drawing pictures on the 
mist for my special benefit. How welcome the rain is ! As I 
am afraid you have heard me say before, what new charm it 
gives to your valley ! ” 

There was something in the buoyancy and force of his mood 
that seemed to make Catherine shrink into herself. She would 
not pursue the subject of Westmoreland. She asked, with a 
little stiffness, whether he had good news from Mrs. Elsmere. 

“ Oh, yes. As usual, she is doing everything for me,” he 
said, smiling. “ It is disgraceful that I should be idling here . 
while she is struggling with carpenters and paperers, and puz- 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


129 


zling out tlie decorations of the drawing-room. She writes to 
me in a fury about the word ‘ artistic.’ She declares even the 
little upholsterer at Churton hurls it at her every other minute, 
and that if it weren’t for me she would select everything as 
frankly, primevally hideous as she could find, just to spite him. 
As it is, he has so warped her judgment that she has left the 
sitting-room papers till I arrive. "For the drawing-room she 
avows a passionate preference for one all cabbage-roses and no 
stalks ; but she admits that it may be exasperation. She wants 
your sister, clearly, to advise her. By the way,” and his voice 
changed, ‘‘ the vicar told me last night that Miss Bose is going 
to Manchester for the winter to study. He heard it from Miss 
Agnes, I think. The news interested me greatly after our con¬ 
versation.” 

He looked at her with the most winning interrogative ejes. 
His vrhole manner implied that everything wdiich touched and 
concerned her touched and concerned him ; and moreover, 
that she had given him in some sort a right to share her 
thoughts and difficulties. Catherine struggled with herself. 

“ I trust it may answer,” she said, in a low voice. 

But she would say no more, and he felt rebuffed. His buoy¬ 
ancy began to desert him. 

“ It must be a great trial to Mrs. Elsmere,” she said presently 
with an effort, once more steering away from herself and her 
concerns, ‘‘ this going back to her old home.” 

“ It is. M}" father’s long struggle for life in that house is a 
very painful memory. I wished her to put it off till I could go 
with her, but she declared she would rather get over the first 
■week or two by herself. How I should like you to know my 
mother. Miss Leyburn ! ” 

At this she could not help meeting his glance and smile, 
and answering them, though with a kind of constraint most 
unlike her. 

‘‘ I hope I may some day see Mrs. Elsmere.” 

“ It is one of my strongest wishes,” he answered hurriedly, 
‘‘ to bring you together.” 

The words were simple enough ; the tone was full of emo¬ 
tion. He was fast losing control of himself. She felt it 
through every nerve, and a sort of wild dread seized her of 
what he might say next. Oh, she must, she must prevent it ! 

Your mother was with you most of your Oxford life, was 
she not ? ” she said, forcing herself to speak in her most every¬ 
day tones. 

He controlled himself with a mighty effort. 

“Since I became a Fellow. We have been alone in the 


130 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


world so long. We have never been able to do without each 
other.” 

“Isn’t it wonderful to you ? ” said Catherine, after a little 
electric pause—and her voice was steadier and clearer than it 
had been since the beginning of their conversation—“ how 
little the majority of sons and daughters regard their parents 
when they come to grow up and want to live their own lives? 
The one thought seems to be to get rid of them, to throw off 
their claims, to cut them adrift, to escape them—decently, of 
course, and under many pretexts, but still to escape them. All 
the long years of devotion and self-sacrifice go for nothing.” 

He looked at her quickly—a troubled, questioning look. 

“ It is so, often ; but not, I think, where the parents have 
truly understood their problem. The real difficulty for father 
and mother is not childhood, but youth ; how to get over 
that difficult time when the child passes into the man or 
woman, and a relation of governor and governed should 
become the purest and closest of friendships. You and I 
have been lucky.” 

“ Yes,” she said, looking straight before her, and still 
speaking with a distinctness which caught his ear painfully, 
“ and so are the greater debtors ! There is no excuse, I think, 
for any child, least of all for the child who has had years of 
understanding love to look back upon, if it puts its own 
claim first; if it insists on satisfying itself, when there is age 
and weakness appealing to it on the other side, when it is still 
urgently needed to help those older, to shield those younger, 
than itself. Its business first of all is to pay its debt, what¬ 
ever the cost.” 

The voice was low, but it had the clear, vibrating ring of 
steel. Robert’s face had darkened visibly. 

“ But, surely,” he cried, goaded by a new stinging sense of 
revolt and pain—“ surely the child may make a fatal mistake 
if it imagines that its own happiness counts for nothing in 
the parents’ eyes. What parent but must suffer from the 
starving of the child’s nature? What have mother and 
father been working for, after all, but the perfecting of the 
child’s life ! Their longing is that it should fulfill itself in 
all directions. New ties, new affections, on the child’s part, 
mean the enriching of the parent. What a cruel fate for the 
elder generation, to make it the jailer and burden of the 
younger ! ” 

He spoke with heat and anger, Avith a sense of dashing 
himself against an obstacle, and a dumb, despairing certainty 
rising at the heart of him. 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


131 


“Ah, that is what we are so ready to say,” she answered, 
her breath coming more quickly, and her eye meeting his 
with a kind of antagonism in it; “but it is all sophistry. 
The only safety lies in following out the plain duty. The 
parent wants the child’s help and care, the child is bound to 
give it; that is all it needs to know. If it forms new ties, it 
belongs to them, not,to the old ones ; the old ones must come 
to be forgotten and put aside.” 

“ So yon would make all life a sacrifice to the past! ” he 
cried, quivering under the blow she was dealing him. 

“No, not all life,” she said, struggling hard to preserve her 
perfect calm of manner : he could not know that she was 
trembling from head to foot. “ There are many for whom it 
is easy and right to choose their own way ; their happiness 
robs no one. There are others on whom a charge has been 
laid from their childhood, a charge perhaps ”—and her voice 
faltered at last—“ impressed on them by dying lips, which 
must govern, possess their lives ; which it would be baseness, 
treason, to betray. We are not here only to be happy.” 

And she turned to him deadly pale, the faintest, sweetest 
smile on her lip. He was for the moment incapable of speech. 
He began phrase after phrase, and broke them off. A whirl¬ 
wind of feeling possessed him. The strangeness, the unworld¬ 
liness of what she had done struck him singularly. He 
realized through every nerve that what she had just said to 
him she had been bracing herself to say to him ever since 
their last parting. And now he could not tell, or, rather, 
blindly could not see, whether she suffered in the saying it. 
A passionate })rotest rose in him, not so much against her 
words as against her self-control. The man in him rose up 
against the woman’s unlooked-for, unwelcome strength. 

But as the hot words she had dared so much in her simplic¬ 
ity to avert from them both were bursting from him, they 
were checked by a sudden physical difficulty. A bit of road 
was under water. A little beck, swollen by the rain, had 
overflowed, and for a few yards’ distance the water stood 
about eight inches deep from hedge to hedge. Robert had 
splashed through the flood half an hour before, but it had 
risen rapidly since then. He had to apply his mind to the 
practical task of finding a way to the other side. 

“You must climb the bank,” he said, “and get through 
into the field.” 

She assented mutely. He went first, drew her up the bank, 
forced his way through the loosely growing hedge himself, 
and holding back some young hazel saplings and breaking 


132 


robeut elsmebe. 


others, made an opening for her through which she scrambled 
with bent head ; then, stretching out liis hand to her, he made 
her submit to be helped down the steep bank on the other 
side. Her straight young figure was just above him, her 
breath almost on his cheek. 

“You talk of baseness and treason,” he began, passionately, 
conscious of a hundred wild impulses, as perforce she leaned 
her light weight upon his arm. “ Life is not so simple. It is 
so easy to sacrifice others with one’s-se*lf, to slay all claims in 
honor of one, instead of knitting the new ones to the old. Is 
life to be allowed no natural expansion ? Have you forgotten 
that, in refusing the new bond for the old bond’s sake, the 
child may be simpl}^ wronging the parents, depriving them of 
another alfection, another suj^port, which ought to have been 
theirs ! ” 

His tone was harsh, almost violent. It seemed to him that 
she grew suddenl}^ white, and he grasped her more firmly still. 
She rebelled the level of the field, quickly withdrew her hand, 
and for a moment their eyes met, her pale face raised to his. 
It seemed an age, so much was said in that look. There was 
appeal on her side, passion on his. Plainly she implored him 
to say no more, to spare her and himself. 

“ In some cases,” she said, and her voice sounded strained 
and hoarse to both of them, “one can not risk the old bond. 
One dare not trust one’s-self—or circumstance. The responsi¬ 
bility is too great ; one can but follow the beaten path, cling 
to the one thread. But don’t let us talk of it any more. We 
must make for that gate, IMr. Elsmere. It will bring us out 
on the road again close by home.” 

He was quelled. Speech suddenly became impossible to 
him. He was struck again with that sense of a will firmer 
and more tenacious than his own, which had visited him in a 
slight passing way on the first evening they ever met, and now 
fiilled him with a kind of despair. As they passed silently 
along the edge of the dripping meadow, he noticed with a 
pang that the stepping-stones \slj just below them. The 
gleam of sun had died away, the aerial valley in the clouds 
had vanished, and a fresh storm of rain brought back the color 
to Catherine’s cheek. On their left hand was the roaring of 
the river, on their right they could already hear the wind 
moaning and tearing through the streams which sheltered 
Burwood. The nature which an hour ago had seemed to him 
so full of stimulus and exhilaration had taken to itself a note of 
gloom and mourning ; for he was at the age when Nature is 
the mere docile responsive mirror of the spirit, when all her 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


1j53 


forces and powers are made for us, and are only there to play 
chox’us to our story. 

They reached the little lane leading to the gate of Burwood. 
She paused at the foot of it. 

•‘You will come in and see my mother, Mr. Elsmere ?” 

Her look expressed a yearning she could not crush. “Your 
pardon, your friendship,” it cried, with the usual futility of all 
good women under the circumstances. But as he met it for 
.one passionate instant, he recognized fully that there was not 
a trace of yielding in it. At the bottom of the softness there 
was the iron of resolution. 

“ No, no ; not now,” he said, involuntarily ; arid she never 
forgot the painful struggle of the face ; “ good-by.” He 
touched her hand without another word, and was gone. 

She toiled up to the gate with difficulty, the gray, rain-washed 
road, the wall, the trees, swimming before her eyes. 

In the hall she came across Agnes, who caught hold of her 
with a start. 

“ My dear Cathie ! you have been walking yourself to 
death. You look like a ghost. Come and have some tea at 
once.” 

And she dragged her into the drawing-room. Catherine 
submitted with all her usual outward calm, faintly smiling at 
her sister’s onslaught. But she would not let Agnes put her 
down on the sofa. She stood with her hand on the back of a 
chair. 

“ The weather is very close and exhausting,” she said, 
gently lifting her hand to her hat. But the hand dropped and 
she sank heavily into the chair. 

“ Cathie, you are faint,” cried Agnes, running to her. 

Catherine waved her away, and, with an effort of which 
none but she would have been capable, mastered the physical 
weakness. 

“ I have been a long way, dear,” she said, as though in 
apology, “ and there is no air. “ Yes, I will go upstairs and 
lie down a minute or two. Oh, no, don’t come ; I will be 
down for tea directly.” 

And refusing all help, she guided herself out of the room, 
her face the color of the foam on the beck outside. Agnes 
stood dumbfounded. Never in her life before had she seen 
Catherine betray any such signs of physical exhaustion. 

Suddenly Rose ran in, shut the door carefully behind her, 
and rushing up to Agnes put her hands on her shoulders. 

“ He has proposed to her, and she has said no ! ” 

“ He ? What, Mr. Elsmere ? How on earth can you know? ” 


134 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


“ I saw them from upstairs come to the bottom of the lane. 
Then he rushed on, and I have just met her on the stairs. It’s 
as plain as the nose on your face.” 

Agnes sat down bewildered. 

“ It is hard on him,” she said at last. 

“ Yes, it livery hard on him! ’’cried Rose, pacing the room, 
her long, thin arms clasped behind her, her eyes flashing, “ for 
she loves him ! ” 

“ Rose ! ” 

“ She does, my dear, she does,” cried the girl, frowning. “ I 
know it in a hundred ways.” 

Agnes ruminated. 

“ And it’s all because of us ! ” she said at last, reflectively. 

“ Of course ! I put it to you, Agnes,”—and Rose stood 
still with a tragic air—“ I put it to you, whether it isn’t too 
bad that three unoffending women should have such a role as 
this assigned them against their will ! ” 

The eloquence of eighteen was irresistible. Agnes buried 
her head in the sofa cushion, and shook with a kind of help¬ 
less laughter. Rose meanwhile stood in the window, her thin 
form drawn up to its full height, angry with Agnes, and en¬ 
raged Avith all the world. 

‘‘It’s absurd, it’s insulting,” she exclaimed. “I should 
imagine that you and I, Agnes, Avere old enough and sane 
enough to look after mamma, put out the stores, or say our 
prayers, and prevent each other from running away Avith ad¬ 
venturers ! I won’t be ahvays in leading-strings. I won’t 
acknoAvledge that Catherine is bound to be an old maid to keep 
me in order. I hate it! It is sacrifice run mad.” 

Rose turned to her sister, the defiant head throAvn back, a 
passion of manifold protest in the girlish looks. 

“It is very easy, my dear, to be judge in one’s OAvn case,” 
replied Agnes calmly, recovering herself. “ Suppose you tell 
Catherine some of those home truths ? ” 

Rose collapsed at once. She sat down despondently, and 
fell, head drooping, into a moody silence. Agnes watched her 
with a kind of triumph. When it came to the |)oint, she kneAv 
perfectly Avell that there Avas not a will among them that could 
measure itself Avith and chance of success against that lofty 
but uiiAvavering will of Catherine’s. Rose Avas violent, and 
there was much reason in her violence. But as for her, she 
preferred not to dash her head against stone Avails. 

“Well, then, if you AA^on’t say them to Catherine, say them 
to mamma,” she suggested presently, but half ironically, 

“ Mamma is no good,” cried Rose angrily ; “ Avhy do 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


135 


yon bring her in ? Catherine would talk her round in ten 
minutes.” 

Long after every one else in Biirwood, even the chafing, ex¬ 
cited Rose, was asleep, Catlierine, in lier dimly lighted room, 
where the stormy northwest wind beat noisily against her 
window, was sitting in a low chair, her head leaning against 
her bed, her little well-worn Testament open on her knee. 
But she W'as not reading. Her eyes were shut ; one hand 
Imng down beside her, and tears were raining fast and silently 
over her cheeks. It was the stillest, most restrained weep¬ 
ing. She hardly knew why she wept, she only knew that there 
was something within her which must have its way. What 
did this inner smart and tumult mean, this rebellion of the 
self against the will which had never yet found its mastery 
fail it ? It was as though from her childhood till now she had 
lived in a moral world whereof the aims, the dangers, the joys, 
were all she knew ; and now the walls of this world were 
crumbling round her, and strange lights, strange voices, 
strange colors were breaking through. All the sayings of 
Christ wdiich had lain closest to her heart for years, to-night 
for the first time seemed to her no longer sayings of comfort 
or command, but sayings of fire and flame that burn their 
coercing way through life and thought. We recite so glibly : 
“He that loseth his life shall save it and when we come to 
any of the common crises of experience which are the source 
and the sanction of the words, flesh and blood recoil. This 
girl amid her mountains had carried religion as far as religion 
can be carried before it meets life in the wrestle appointed it. 
The calm, simple outlines of things are blurring before her 
eyes ; the great, placid deeps of the soul are breaking up. 

To the purest ascetic temper a struggle of this kind is hardly 
real. Catherine felt a bitter surprise at her own pain. Yes¬ 
terday a sort of mystical exaltation upheld her. What had 
broken it down ? 

Simply a pair of reproachful eyes, a pale, protesting face. 
What trifles compared to the awful necessities of an infinite 
obedience ! And yet they haunt her, till her heart aches for 
misery, till she only j^earns to be counseled, to be forgiven, to 
be at least understood. 

“ Why, why am I so weak ?” she cried, in utter abasement 
of soul, and knew not that in that weakness, or rather in the 
founts of character from which it sprung, lay the innermost 
safeguard of her life. 


136 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


CHAPTER IX. 

Robeet was very nearly reduced to despair by the scene 
with Catherine we have described. He spent a brooding and 
miserable hour in the vicar’s studj" afterward, making up his 
mind as to what ho should do. One phrase of hers which had 
passed almost unnoticed in the shock of the moment was now 
ringing in his ears, maddening him by a sense of joy just with¬ 
in his reach, and yet barred away from him by an obstacle as 
strong as it was intangible. “ We are not here only to he 
happyy’’ she had said to him, with a look of ethereal exaltation 
worthy of her namesake of Alexandria. The words had slipped 
from her involuntaril}'' in the spiritual tension of her mood. 
They were now filling Robert Elsmere’s mind with a torment¬ 
ing, torturing bliss. What conld they mean ? What had her 
paleness, her evident trouble and weakness meant, but that the 
inmost self of hers was his, was conquered; and that, but for 
the shadowy obstacle between them, all would be well ? 

As for the obstacle in itself, he did not admit its force for a 
moment. No sane and practical man, least of all when that 
man happened to be Catherine Leyburn’s lover, could regard it 
as a binding obligation upon her that she should sacrifice her 
own life and happiness to three persons, who were in no evi¬ 
dent moral straits, no physical or pecuniary need, and who, as 
Rose incoherently put it, might very well be rather braced 
than injured by the withdrawal of her strong support. 

But the obstacle of character—ah, there was a different mat¬ 
ter ! He realized with despair the brooding, scrupulous force 
of moral passion to which her lonely life, her antecedents, and 
her father’s nature working in her had given so rare and marked 
a development. No temper in the world is so little open to 
reason as the ascetic temper. How many a lover and husband, 
flow many a parent and friend, have realized to their pain, 
since history began, the overwhelming attraction which all the 
processes of self-annihilation have for a certain order of minds! 
Robert’s heart sank before the memory of that frail, indomita¬ 
ble look, that aspect of sad yet immovable conviction with 
which she had bade him farewell. And yet, surely—surely 
under the willingness of the spirit there had been a pitiful, a 
most womanly weakness of the flesh. Surely, now memory 
reproduced the scene, she had been white—trembling: her 
hand had rested on the moss-grown wall beside her for sup¬ 
port. Oh, why had he been so timid ? Why had he let that 
awe of her, which her personalit}^ produced so readily, stand 
between them ? Why had he not boldl}" caught her to himself. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


ISY 

and, with all the eloquence of a passionate nature, trampled on 
her scruples, marched through her doubts, convinced—rea¬ 
soned her into a blessed submission ? 

“ And I will do it yet ! ” he cried, leaping to his feet with a 
sudden access of hope and energy. And he stood awhile look¬ 
ing out into the rainy evening, all the keen, irregular face and 
thin, pliant form hardening into the intensity of resolve, which 
had so often carried the young tutor through an Oxford diffi¬ 
culty, breaking down antagonism and compelling consent. 

At the high tea which represented the late dinner of the 
household he was wary and self-possessed. Mrs. Thornburgh 
got out of him that he liad been for a walk, and had seen Cath¬ 
erine, but for all her ingenuities of cross-examination she got 
nothing more. Afterward, when he and the vicar were smok¬ 
ing together, he proposed to Mr. Thornburgh that they two 
should go off for a couple of days on a walking tour to Ulls- 
water. 

“ I want to go away,” he said, with a hand on the vicar’s 
shoulder, “ and 1 want to come hack.’’'* The deliberation of 
the last words was not to be mistaken. The vicar emitted a 
contented puff, looked the young man straight in the eyes, and 
without another word began to plan a walk to Patterdale via 
High Street, Martindale, and HowtoAvn, and back by Hawes- 
water. 

To Mrs. Thornburgh Robert announced that he must leave 
them on the following Saturday, June 24. 

“ You have given me a good time. Cousin Emma,” he said 
to her, with a bright friendliness which dumbfounded her. A 
good time, indeed ! with eveiything begun and nothing fin¬ 
ished; with two households throAvn into perturbation for a de¬ 
lusion, and a desirable marriage spoiled, all for want of a little 
common sense and plain speaking, which one person at least 
in the valley could have supplied them with, had she not been 
ignored and browbeaten on all sides. She contained herself, 
however, in her presence, but the vicar suffered proportionately^ 
in the privacy of the connubial chamber. He had never seen 
his wife so exasperated. To think what might have been, 
what she might have done for the race, but for the Avhims of 
two stuck-up, superior, impracticable young persons, that 
would neither manage their own affairs nor allow other people 
to manage them for tliem ! The vicar behaved gallantly, kept 
the secret of Elsmere’s remark to himself like a man, and al¬ 
lowed himself certain counsels against matrimonial meddling 
which plunged Mrs. Thornburgh into Avell-simulated slumber. 
However, in the morning he was vaguely conscious that some 


138 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


time in the visions of the night his spouse had demanded of 
him, peremptorily: ‘‘ When do you get back, William? ” To 
the best of his memory the vicar had sleepily murmured : 

“ Thursday”; and had then heard, echoed through his dreams, 
a calculating whisper : “ He goes Saturday—one clear day ! ” 
The following morning was gloomy but fine, and after 
breakfast the vicar and Elsmere started off. Robert turned 
back at the top of the High Fell pass and stood leaning on 
his alpenstock, sending a passionate farewell to the gray dis¬ 
tant house, the upper window, the copper beech in the garden, 
the bit of winding road, while the vicar discreetly stepped on 
northward, his eyes fixed on the wild regions of Martindale. 

Mrs. Thornburgh, left alone, absorbed herself to all appear¬ 
ance in the school'treat which was to come off in a fortnight, 
in a new set of covers for the drawing-room, and in Sarah’s 
love affairs, which were always passing through some tragic 
phase or other, and into which Mrs. Thornburgh was allowed 
a more unencumbered view than she was into Catherine Ley- 
burn’s. Rose and Agnes dropped in now and then, and found 
her not at all disposed to talk to them on the great event 
of the day—Elsmere’s absence and approaching departure. 
They cautiously communicated to her their suspicions as to 
the incident of the preceding afternoon ; and Rose gave vent 
to one fiery onslaught on the “moral obstacle” theory, dur¬ 
ing which Mrs. Thornburgh sat studying her with small, at¬ 
tentive eyes and curls slowly waving from side to side. But 
for once in her life the vicar’s Avife Avas not conmunicative in 
return. That the situation should have driven even Mrs. 
Thornburgh to finesse Avas a surprising testimony to its grav¬ 
ity. What betAveen her sudden taciturnity and Catherine’s 
pale silence, the girl’s sense of expectancy A\"as roused to its 
highest pitch. 

“They come back to-morroAV night,” said Rose thought¬ 
fully, “and he goes Saturday—10:20 from Whinborough— 
one day for the fifth act ! the way, A\diy did Mrs. Thorn¬ 
burgh ask us to say nothing about Saturday at home ? ” 

She had asked them, hoAveA^er ; and Avith a pleasing sense 
of conspiracy they complied. 

It Avas late on Thursdaj’^ afternoon Avhen Mrs. Thornburgh, 
finding the Burwood front door open, made her unchallenged 
Avay into the hall, and after an unanswered knock at the 
draAving-room door, opened it and peered in to see who might 
be there. 

“ May I come in ? ” 

Mrs. Leyburn, Avho was a trifie deaf, Avas sitting by the win- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


139 


dow absorbed in the intricacies of a heel which seemed to her 
more then she could manage. Her card was mislaid, the girls 
were none of them at hand, and she felt as helpless as she 
commonly did when left alone. 

“ Oh, do come in, please ! So glad to see you. Have you 
nearly blown away ? ” 

For, though the rain had stopped, a boisterous northwest 
wind was still rushing through the valley, and the trees round 
Burwood were swaying and groaning under the force of its 
onslaught. 

‘‘Well, it is stormy,” said Mrs Thornburgh, stepping in 
and undoing all the various safety-pins and elastics which 
had held her dress high above the mud. “ Are the girls 
out?” 

• “ Yes, Catherine and Agnes are at the school; and Rose, I 
think, is practicing.” 

“ Ah, well,” said Mrs. Thornburgh, settling herself in a 
chair close by her friend, “I wanted to find you alone.” 

Her face, framed in bushy curls and an old garden bonnet, 
was flushed and serious. Her mittened hands were clasped 
nervously on her lap, and there was about her such an air of 
forcibly restrained excitement that Mrs. Leyburn’s mild eyes 
gazed at her with astonishment. The two women were a 
curious contrast: Mrs. Thornburgh short, inclined, as we 
know, to be stout, ample and abounding in all things, whether 
it were curls or cap strings or conversation : Mrs. Leyburn 
tall and well-proportioned, well dressed, with the same grace¬ 
ful ways and languid pretty manners as had first attracted her 
husband’s attention thirty years before. She was fond of 
Mrs. Thornburgh, but there was something in the ebullient 
energies of the vicar’s wife which always gave her a sense of 
bustle and fatigue. 

“ I am sure you will be sorry to hear,” began her visitor, 
“ that Mr. Elsmere is going.” 

“ Going ? ” said Mrs. Leyburn, laying down her knitting. 
“ Why, I thought he was going to stay with you another ten 
days at least.” 

“ So did I—so did he,” said Mrs. Thornburgh, nodding, 
and then pausing with a most effective air of sudden gravity 
and “recollection.” 

“ Then why—what’s the matter ? ” asked Mrs. Leyburn, 
wondering. 

Mrs. Thornburgh did not answer for a mmute, and Mrs. 
Leyburn began to feel a little nervous, her visitor’s eyes were 
fixed upon her with so much meaning. Urged by a sudden 


140 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


impulse she bent forward ; so did Mrs. Thornburgh, and their 
two elderly heads nearly touched. 

‘‘ The young man is in love ! ” said the vicar’s, wife, in a 
stage-whisper, drawing back after a pause to see the effect of 
her announcement. 

Oh ! with whom ? ” asked Mrs. Leyburn, her look bright¬ 
ening. She liked a love affair as much as ever. 

Mrs. Thornburgh furtively looked round to see if the door 
was shut and all safe—she felt herself a criminal, but the 
sense of guilt had an exhilarating rather than a depressing 
effect upon her. 

“ Have you guessed nothing ? have the girls told you any¬ 
thing ?'” 

‘‘ No ! ” said Mrs. Leyburn, her eyes opening wider and 
wider. She never guessed anything ; there was no need, with 
three daughters to think for her, and give her the benefit of 
their young brains. “No,” she said again. “ I can’t imagine 
what you mean.” 

Mrs. Thornburgh felt a rush of inward contempt for so 
much obtuseness. 

“Well, then, he is in love with Catherine !she said, ab¬ 
ruptly, laying her hand on Mrs. Leyburn’s knee, and watch¬ 
ing the effect. 

“ With Catherine ! ” stammered Mrs. Leyburn ; “ with 

Catherine ! ” 

The idea was amazing to her. She took up her knitting 
with trembling fingers, and went on with it mechanically a 
second or two. Then laying it down—“ Are you quite sure ? 
has he told you ? ” 

“ No, but one has eyes,” said Mrs. Thornburgh, hastily. 
“ William and I have seen it from the very first day. And 
we are both certain that on Tuesday she made him understand 
in some way or other that she wouldn’t marry him, and that 
is why he went off to Ullswater, and why he made up his 
mind to go south before his time is up.” 

“Tuesday?” cried Mrs. Leyburn. “In that walk, do you 
mean, when Catherine looked so tired afterward ? You think 
he. proposed in that walk ? ” 

She was in a maze of bewilderment and excitement. 

“Something like it—but if he did, she said ‘No’; and 
what I want to know is why she said ‘No.’ ” 

“ Why, of course, because she didn’t care for him ! ” ex¬ 
claimed Mrs. Leyburn, opening her blue eyes wider and 
wider, “ Catherine’s not like most girls ; she would always 
know what she felt, and would never keep a man in suspense.” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


141 


Well, I don’t somehow believe,” said Mrs. Thornburgh, 
boldly, “ that she doesn’t care for him. He is just the young 
man Catherine might care for. You can see that yourself.” 

Mrs. Leyburn once more laid down her knitting and stared 
at her visitor. Mrs. Thornburgh, after all her meditations, 
had no very precise idea as to why she was at that moment in 
the Burwood drawing-room bombarding Mrs. Leyburn in 
this fashion. All she knew was that she had sallied forth 
determined somehow to upset the situation, just as one gives 
a shake purposely to a bundle of spillikins on the chance of 
more favorable openings. Mrs. Leyburn’s mind was just now 
playing the part of spillikins, and the vicar’s wife was shaking 
it vigorously, though with occasional qualms as to the law¬ 
fulness of the process. 

“ You think Catherine does care for him ? ” resumed Mrs. 
Leyburn tremulously. 

“ Well, isn’t he just the kind of man one would suppose 
Catherine would like ? ” repeated Mrs. Thornburgh, persua¬ 
sively ; “ he is a clergyman, and she likes serious people ; 
and he’s sensible and nice and well-mannered. And then he 
can talk about books, just like her father used—I’m sure 
William thinks he knows everything ! He isn’t as nice-look¬ 
ing as he might be just now, but then that’s his hair and his 
fever, poor man. And then he isn’t hanging about. He’s 
got a living, and there’d be the poor people all ready, and 
everything else Catherine likes. And now I’ll just ask you— 
did you ever see Catherine more—more— lively —well, I know 
that’s not just the word, but you know what I mean—than 
she has been the last fortnight ? ” 

But Mrs. Leyburn only shook her head helplessly. She did 
not know in the least what Mrs. Thornburgh meant. She 
never thought Catherine doleful, and she agreed that cer¬ 
tainly “ lively ” was not the word. 

“ Girls get so frightfully particular nowadays,” continued 
the vicar’s wife, with reflective candor. “ Why, when 
William fell in love with me, I just fell in love with him—at 
once—because he did. And if it hadn’t been William, but 
somebody else, it would have been the same. I don’t believe 
girls have got hearts like pebbles—if the man’s nice, of 
course ! ” 

Mrs. Leyburn listened to this summary of matrimonial phil¬ 
osophy with the same yielding, flurried attention as she was 
always disposed to give to the last speaker. 

“ But,” she said, still in a maze, “ if she did care for him, 
why should she send him away ? ” 


142 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


because she worCt have him ! ” said Mrs. Thornburgh en¬ 
ergetically, leaning over the arm of her chair that she might 
bring herself nearer to her companion. 

The fatuity of the answer left Mrs. Leyburn staring. 

“ Because "she won’t have him, my dear Mrs. Leyburn ! 
And—and—I’m sure nothing would make me interfere like 
this if I weren’t so fond of you all, and if William and I 
didn’t know for certain that there never was a better young 
man born ! And then I was just sure you’d be the last person 
in the world, if you knew, to stand in young people’s way ! ” 

“ I! ” cried poor Mrs. Leyburn—“ I stand in the way ! ” 
she was getting tremulous and tearful, and Mrs. Thornburgh 
felt herself a brute. 

“Well,” she said, plunging on desperately, “ I have been 
thinking over it night and day. I’ve been watching him, and 
I’ve been talking to the girls, and I’ve been putting two and 
two together, and I’m just about sure that there might be a 
chance for Robert, if only Catherine didn’t feel that you and 
the girls couldn’t get on without her ! ” 

Mrs. Leyburn took up her knitting again with agitated fin¬ 
gers. She was so long in answering that Mrs. Thornburgh sat 
and thought with trepidation of all sorts of unpleasant conse¬ 
quences which might result from this audacious move of hers. 

“ I don’t know how we shoidd get on,” cried Mrs. Leyburn 
at last, with a sort of suppressed sob, while something very 
like a tear fell on the stocking she held. 

Mrs. Thornburgh was still more frightened, and rushed into 
a flood of apologetic speech. Very likely she was wrong, per¬ 
haps it was all a mistake, she was afraid she had done harm, 
and so on. Mrs. Leyburn took very little heed, but at last 
she said, looking up and applying a soft handkerchief gently 
to her eyes : 

“Is his mother nice? Where’s his living? Would he 
want to be married soon ? ” 

The voice was weak and tearful, but there was in it unmis¬ 
takable eagerness to be informed. Mrs. Thornburgh, over¬ 
joyed, let loose upon her a flood of particulars, painted the 
virtues and talents of Mrs. Elsmere, described Robert’s Oxford 
career, with an admirable sense for effect and a truly feminine 
capacity for murdering every university detail, drew pictures 
of the Murewell living and rectory, of which Robert had pho¬ 
tographs with him, threw in adroit information about the 
young man’s private means, and in general showed what may 
be made of a woman’s mind under the stimulus of one of the 
occupations most proper to it. Mrs. Leyburn brightened 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


143 


visibly as the flood proceeded. Alas, poor Catherine ! How 
little room there is for the heroic in this trivial every-day life 
of ours ! 

Catherine a bride, Catherine a wife and mother, dim visions 
of a white, soft morsel in which Catherine’s eyes and smile 
should live again—all these thoughts w’ent trembling and 
flashing through Mrs. Leyburn’s mind as she listened to Mrs. 
Thornburgh. There is so much of the artist in the maternal 
mind, of the artist who longs to see the work of his hand in 
fresh combinations and under all points of view. Catherine, 
in the heat of her own self-surrender, had perhaps forgotten 
that her mother too had a heart! 

“Yes, it all sounds very well,” said Mrs. Leyburn at last, 
sighing, “ but, you know, Catherine isn’t easy to manage.” 

“ Could you talk to her—find out a little ? ” 

“ Well, not to-day ; I shall hardly see her. Doesn’t it seem 
to you that when a girl takes up notions like Catherine’s, she 
hasn’t time for thinking about the young men ? Why, she’s 
as full of business all day long as an egg’s full of meat. Well, 
it was my poor Richard’s doing—it was his doing, bless him ! 
I am not going to say anything against it. But it was differ¬ 
ent—once.” 

“ Yes, I know,” said Mrs. Thornburgh, thoughtfully. “ One 
had plenty of time, when you and I were young, to sit at 
home and think what one was going to wear, and how one 
would look, and whether he had been paying attention to any 
orie else : and if he had, w^hy ; and all that. And now the 
young women are so superior. But the marrying has got to 
be done somehow, all the some. What is she doing to-day ? ” 

“ Oh, she’ll be busy all to-day and to-morrow ; I hardly ex¬ 
pect to see her till Saturdaj^” 

Mrs. Thornburgh gave a start of dismay. 

“ Why, what is the matter now ? ” she cried in her most 
aggrieved tones. “ My dear Mrs. Leyburn, one w’ould think 
we had the cholera in the parish. Catherine just spoils the 
people.” 

“ Don’t you remember,” said Mrs. Leyburn, staring in her 
turn, and drawing herself up a little, “ that to-morrow is 
Midsummer-day, and that Mary Backhouse is as bad as she 
can be ? ” 

“ Mary Backhouse ! Why, I had forgotten all about her ?” 
cried the vicar’s wife, with sudden remorse. And she sat pen¬ 
sively eyeing the carpet awhile. 

Then she got w'hat particulars she could out of Mrs. Ley¬ 
burn. Catherine, it appeared, was at this moment at High 


144 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Ghyll, was not to return till late, and would be with the dying 
girl through the greater part of the following day, returning 
for an hour or two’s rest in the afternoon, and staying in the 
evening till the twilight, in which the ghost always made her 
appearances, should have passed into night. 

Mrs. Thornburgh listened to it all, her contriving mind 
working the while at railroad speed on the facts presented 
to her. 

“ How do you get her home to-morrow night ? ” she asked, 
with sudden animation. 

“ Oh, we send our man Richard, at ten. He takes a lantern 
if it’s dark.” 

Mrs. Thornburgh said no more. Her eyes and gestures 
were all alive again with energy and hope. She had given 
her shake to Mrs. Leyburn’s mind. Much good might it do ! 
But, after all, she had the poorest opinion of the widow’s 
capacities as an ally. 

She and her companion said a few more excited, affection¬ 
ate, and apologetic things to one another, and then she de¬ 
parted. 

Both mother and knitting were found by Agnes half an 
hour later in a state of considerable confusion. But Mrs. Ley- 
burn kept her own counsel, having resolved for once, Avith a 
timid and yet delicious excitement, to act as the head of the 
family. 

Meanwhile Mrs. Thornburgh was laying plans of her own 
account. 

“ Ten o’clock—moonlight,” said that contriving person to 
herself, going home—“ at least if the clouds hold up—that’ll 
do—couldn’t be better.” 

To any person familiar with her character, the signs of some 
unusual preoccupation were clear enough in Mrs. Leyburn 
during this Thursday evening. Catherine noticed them at 
once when she got back from High Ghyll about eight o’clock, 
and wondered first of all what was the matter ; and then, with^ 
more emphasis, why the trouble Avas not immediately com¬ 
municated to her. It had never entered into her head to take 
her mother into her confidence with regard to Elsmere. Since 
she could remember, it had been an axiom in the family to 
spare the delicate, nervous mother all the anxieties and per¬ 
plexities of life. It was a system in which the subject of it 
had always acquiesced with perfect contentment, and Cath¬ 
erine had no qualms about it. If there was good news, it was 
presented in its most sugared form to Mrs. Leyburn ; but the 
moment any element of pain and difficulty cropped up in the 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


145 


common life, it was pounced upon and appropriated by Cath¬ 
erine, aided and abetted by the girls, and Mrs. Leyburn knew 
no more about it than an un weaned babe. 

So that Catherine was thinking at most of some misconduct 
of a Perth dyer with regard to her mother’s best gray poplin, 
when one of the greatest surprises of her life burst upon her. 

She was in Mrs. Leyburn’s bedroom that night, helping to 
put away her mother’s things, as her custom was. She had 
just taken off the widow’s cap, caressing as she did so the 
brown hair underneath, which was still soft and plentiful, 
when Mrs. Leyburn turned upon her. ‘‘ Catherine ! ” she 
said, in an agitated voice, laying a thin hand on her daugh¬ 
ter’s arm, “ Oh, Catherine, I want to speak to you ! ” 

Catherine knelt lightly down by her mother’s side, and put 
her arms round her waist. 

Yes, mother darling,” she said, half smiling. 

“ Oh, Catherine ! if—if—you like Mr. Elsmere, don’t mind— 
don’t think—about us, dear. We can manage—we can man¬ 
age, dear ! ” 

The change that took place in Catherine Leyburn’s face is 
indescribable. She rose instantly, her arms falling behind 
her, her beautiful brows drawn together. Mrs Leyburn looked 
up at her with a pathetic mixture of helplessness, alarm, 
entreaty. 

‘‘ Mother, who has been talking to you about Mr. Elsmere 
and me ? ” demanded Catherine. 

‘‘ Oh, never mind, dear; never mind,” said the widow 
hastily ; “ I should have seen it myself—oh, I know I should ; 
but I’m a bad mother, Catherine ! ” And she caught her 
daughter’s dress and drew her toward her. ‘‘ Do you care 
for him ? ” 

Catherine did not answer. She knelt down again, and laid 
her head on her mother’s hands. 

“ I want nothing,” she said presently, in a low voice of in¬ 
tense emotion—‘‘ I want nothing but you and the girls. You 
are my life, I ask for nothing more. I am abundantly—con- 
tent.” 

Mrs Leyburn gazed down on her with infinite perplexity. 
The brown hair, escaped from the cap, had fallen about her 
still pretty neck, a pink spot of excitement was on each gently 
hollowed cheek ; she looked almost younger than her pale 
daughter. 

“ J3ut—lie is very nice,” she said, timidly. And he has 
a good living. Catherine, you ought to be a clergyman’s 
wife.” 


146 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


“ I ought to be, and I am, your daughter,” said Catherine, 
smiling a little with an unsteady lip, and kissing her hand. 

Mrs. Leyburn sighed and looked straight before her. Per¬ 
haps in imagination she saw the vicar’s wife. “ I think—I 
think,” she said, very seriously, “ I should like it! ” 

Catherine straightened herself brusquely at that. It was as 
though she had felt a blow. 

“ Mother ! ” she cried, with a stifled accent of pain, and yet 
still trying to smile, “ do you want to send me away ? ” 

“ No, no ! ” cried Mrs. Leyburn hastily. But if a nice man 
wants you to marry him, Catherine ? Your father would 
have liked him—oh, I know your father would have liked 
him ! And his manners to me are so pretty, I shouldn’t mind 
being his mother-in-law. And the girls have no brother, 3^011 
know, dear. Your father was always so sorry about that.” 

She spoke with pleading agitation, her own tempting imag¬ 
inations—the pallor, the latent storm of Catherine’s look—ex¬ 
citing her more and more. 

Catherine was silent a moment, then she caught her moth¬ 
er’s hand again. 

“ Dear little mother—dear, kind little mother ! You are an 
angel, you always are. But I think, if you’ll keep me. I’ll 
Stf 



And she once more rested her head clingingly on Mrs. Ley- 
burn’s knee. 

“ But do you —do you love him, Catherine ? ” 

“I love you, mother, and the girls, and my life here.” 

Oh, dear,” sighed Mrs. Le^^burn, as though addressing a 
third person, the tears in her mild eyes, “ she won’t, and she 
wovld like it, and so should I ! ” 

Catherine rose, stung beyond bearing. 

“And I count for nothing to you, mother ! ” her deep voice 
quivering. “ You could put me aside, you and the girls, and 
live as though I had never been ! ” 

“ But you would be a great deal to us if you did marry, 
Catherine ! ” cried Mrs. Leyburn, almost with an accent of 
pettishness. “People have to do without their daughters. 
There’s Agnes—I often think, as it is, j’-ou might let her do 
more. And if Rose were troublesome, why, you know it 
might be a good thing—a very good thing—if there were a 
man to take her in hand ! ” 

“ And you, mother, without me ! ” cried poor Catherine, 
choked. 

“ Oh, I should come and see you,” said Mrs. Lej^burn, 
brightening. “ They say it is such a nice house, Catherine’ 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


147 


and such pretty country; and I’m sure I should like his 
mother, though she is Irish ! ” 

It was the bitterest moment of Catherine Leyburn’s life. In 
it the heroic dream of years broke down. Nay, the shriveling, 
ironic touch of circumstance laid upon it made it look even 
in her own eyes almost ridiculous. What had she been 
living for, praying for, all these years ? She threw herself 
down by the widow’s side, her face working with a passion 
that terrified Mrs. Leyburn. 

Oh, mother, say you would miss me—say you would miss 
me if I went ! ” 

Then Mrs. Leyburn herself broke down, and the two women 
clung to each other, weeping. Catherine’s sore heart was 
soothed a little by her mother’s tears, and by the broken 
words of endearment that were lavished on her. But through 
it all she felt that the excited imaginative desire in Mrs. Ley¬ 
burn still persisted. It was the cheai^ening—the vulgarizing, 
so to speak, of her whole existence. 

In the course of their long embrace, Mrs. Leyburn let fall 
various items of news that showed Catherine very plainly 
who had been at work upon her mother, and one of which 
startled her. 

“ He comes back to-night, my dear—and he goes on Satur¬ 
day. Oh, and Catherine, Mrs. Thornburgh says he does care 
so much. Poor young man ! ” 

And Mrs. Leyburn looked up at her now standing daughter 
with eyes as woe-begone for Elsmere as for herself. 

“Don’t talk about it any more, mother,” Catherine im¬ 
plored. “You won’t sleep, and I shall be more wroth with 
Mrs. Thornburgh than I am already.” 

Mrs. Leyburn let herself be gradually soothed -and coerced, 
and Catherine, with a last kiss to the delicate, emaciated fin¬ 
gers on which the Avorn wedding-ring lay slipping forward— 
in itself a history—left her at last to sleep. 

“ And I don’t know much more than when I began ! ” sighed 
the perplexed widow to herself. “ Oh, I wish Richard was 
here—I do ! ” 

Catherine’s night Avas a night of intense mental struggle. 
Her struggle Avas one Avitli Avhich the modern Avorld has per¬ 
haps but scant sympathy. Instinctively we feel such things out 
of place in our easy, indifferent generation. We think them 
more than half unreal. We are so apt to take it for granted 
that the world has outgroAvn the religious thirst for sanctifi¬ 
cation, for a perfect moral consistency, as it has outgrown so 
many of the older complications of the sentiment of honor. 


148 


llOBERT ELSMERE. 


And meanwhile lialf the tragedy of our time lies in this per¬ 
petual clashing of two estimates of life—the estimate which is 
the offspring of the scientific spirit, and which is forever 
making the visible world fairer and more desirable in mortal 
eyes ; and the estimate of St. Augustine. 

As a matter of fact, owing to some traveling difficulties, the 
vicar and Elsmere did not get home till noon on Friday. 
Catherine knew nothing of either delay or arrival. Mrs. Ley- 
burn watched her with anxious timidity, but she never men¬ 
tioned Elsmere’s name to any one on the Friday morning, and 
no one dared speak of him to her. She came home in the 
afternoon from the Backhouses’ absorbed apparently in the 
state of the dying girl, took a couple of hours’ rest, and hur¬ 
ried off again. She passed the vicarage with bent head, and 
never looked up. 

“ She is gone ! ” said Rose to Agnes, as she stood at the 
window looking after her sister’s retreating figure. “ It is all 
over ! They can’t meet now. He will be off by nine to¬ 
morrow.” 

The girl spoke with a lump in her throat, and flung herself 
down by the window, moodily watching the dark form against 
the fells. Catherine’s coldness seemed to make all life colder 
and more chilling—to fling a hard denial in the face of the 
dearest claims of earth. 

The stormy light of the afternoon was fading toward sun¬ 
set. Catherine walked on fast toward the group of houses at 
the head of the valley, in one of which lived the two old car¬ 
riers who had worked such havoc with Mrs. Thornburgh’s 
housekeeping arrangements. She was tired physically, but 
she was still more tired mentally. She had the bruised feel¬ 
ing of one who has been humiliated before the world and 
before herself. Her self-respect was for the moment crushed, 
and the breach made in the wholeness of personal dignit}" had 
produced a strange slackness of nerve, extending both to body 
and mind. She had been convicted, it seemed to her, in her 
own eyes, and in those of her world, of an egregious over¬ 
estimate of her own value. She walked with hung head like 
one ashamed, the overstrung religious sense deepeiiing her dis¬ 
comfiture at every step, llow rich her life had always been 
in the conviction of usefulness—nay, indispensableness ! Her 
mother’s persuasions had dashed it from her. And religious 
scruple, for her torment, showed her her past, transfomied, 
alloyed with all sorts of personal prides and cravings, which 
stood unmasked now in a white light. 

And he ? Still near her for a few short hours ! Every 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


149 


pulse in her had thrilled as she had passed the house which 
sheltered him. But she will see him no more. And she is 
glad. If he had stayed on, he too would have discovered how 
cheaply they held her—those dear ones of hers for whom she 
had lived until now ! And she might have weakly yielded to 
his pity what she had refused to his homage. The strong 
nature is half tortured, half soothed by the prospect of his 
doing. Perhaps when he is gone she will recover something 
of that moral equilibrium which has been so shaken. At 
present she is a riddle to herself, invaded by a force she has 
no power to cope with, feeling the moral ground of years 
crumbliTig beneath her, and struggling feverishly for self- 
control. 

As she neared the head of the valley the wind became less 
tempestuous. The great wall of High Fell, toward which she 
was walking, seemed to shelter her from its worst violence. 
But the hurrying clouds, the gleams of lurid light which 
every now and then penetrated into the valley from the west, 
across the dip leading to Shanmoor, the voice of the river 
answering the voice of the wind, and the deep unbroken 
shadow that covered the group of houses and trees toward 
which she was walking, all served to heighten the nervous 
depression which had taken hold of her. As she neared the 
bridge, however, leading to the little hamlet, beyond which 
northward all w'as stony loneliness and desolation, and saw in 
front of her the gray stone house, backed by the somber red 
of a great copper beech, and overhung by crags, she had per¬ 
force to take herself by both hands, try and realize her mission 
afresh, and the scene which lay before her. 

CHAPTER X. 

Mary Backhouse, the girl whom Catherine had been visit¬ 
ing with regularity for many weeks, and whose frail life was 
this evening nearing a terrible and long-expected crisis, was 
the victim of a fate sordid and common enough, yet not with¬ 
out its elements of dark poetry. Some fifteen months before 
this mid-summer day she had been the mistress of the lonely 
old house in which her father and uncle had passed their 
whole lives, in which she had been born, and in which, amid 
snow-drifts so deep that no doctor could reach them, her 
mother had passed away. She had been then strong and well 
favored, possessed of a certain masculine black-browed beauty, 
and of a temper which sometimes gave to it an edge and glow 
such as an artist of ambition might have been glad to catch. 


150 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


At the bottom of all the outward sauvagerie, however, there 
was a heart, and strong wants, wliich only affection and com¬ 
panionship could satisfy and tame. Neither was to be found 
in sufficient measure within her home. Her father and she 
were on fairly good terms, and had for each other up to a 
certain point the natural instincts of kinshij). On lier uncle, 
whom she regarded as half-witted, she bestowed alternate 
tolerance and jeers. She was, indeed, the only person whose 
remonstrances ever got under the wool wdth old Jim, and her 
sharp tongue had sometimes a cowing effect on his curious 
nonchalance wdiich nothing else had. For the rest, they had 
no neighbors with whom the girl could fraternize, and Whin- 
borougli, Avas too far off to provide any adequate food for her 
vague hunger after emotion and excitement. 

In this dangerous morbid state she fell a victim to the very 
coarse attractions of a young farmer in tlie neighboring valley 
of Shanmoor. He was a brute with a handsome face, and a 
nature in Avhich whatever grains of heart and conscience 
might have been interfused with the original composition had 
been long since swamped. Mary, Avho had recklessly flung 
herself into his power on one or two occasions, from a mix¬ 
ture of motives, parti}'' passion, partly jealousy, partly ennui, 
awoke one day to find herself ruined, and a grim future hung 
before her. She had realized her doom for the first time in 
its entirety on the Midsummer-day preceding that we are now 
describing. On that day she had walked over to Shanmoor 
in a fever of dumb rage and despair, to claim from her be¬ 
trayer the fulfillment of his promise of marriage. He had 
laughed at her, and she had fled home in the w^arm rainy dusk, 
a prey to all those torturing terrors which only a woman hi 
extremis can know. And on her way back she had seen the 
ghost or “ bogle ” of Deep Crag ; the ghost had spoken to 
her, and she had reached home more dead than alive, having 
received what she at once recognized as her death-sentence. 

What had she seen ? An effect of moonlighted mist—a 
shepherd boy bent on a practical joke—a gleam of white 
waterfall among the darkening rocks ? What had she heard ? 
The evening greeting of a passer-by, wafted down to her from 
some higher path along the fell ? distant voices in the farm 
inclosures beneath her feet ? or simply the eerie sounds of the 
mountain, those weird earth-whispers wliich haunt the lonely 
places of nature ? Who can tell ? Neiwes and brain were 
strained to their uttermost. The legend of the ghost—of the 
girl who had throAvn her baby and herself into the tarn under 
the frowning precipitous cliffs which marked the western end 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


151 


of High Fell, and who had since then walked the lonely road 
to Shanmoor every Midsummer-night, with her moaning child 
upon her arm—had flashed into Mary’s mind as she left the 
white-walled village of Shanmoor behind her, and climbed 
upward with her shame and her secret into the mists. To 
see the bogle was merely distressing and untoward ; to be 
spoken to by the phantom voice was death. No one so ad¬ 
dressed could hope to survive the following Midsummer-day. 
Revolving these things in her mind, along with the terrible 
details of her own story, the exhausted girl had seen her 
vision, and, as she firmly believed, incurred her doom. 

A week later she had disappeared from home and from the 
neighborhood. The darkest stories were afloat. She had 
taken some money with her, and all trace of her was lost. 
The father had a period of gloomy taciturnity, during which 
his principal relief was got out of jeering and girding at his 
elder brother; the noodle’s eyes wandered and glittered 
more ; his shrunken frame seemed more shrunken as he sat 
dangling his spindle legs from the shaft of the carrier’s cart ; 
his absence of mind was for a time more marked, and excused 
with less buoyancy and inventiveness than usual. But otlier- 
wise all went on as before. John Backhouse took no step, 
and for nine months nothing was heard of his daughtei*. 

At last one cheerless March afternoon, Jim, coming back 
first from the Wednesday round with the cart, entered the 
farm kitchen, while John Backhouse was still wrangling at 
one of the other farm-houses of the hamlet about some dis¬ 
puted payment. The old man came in cold and weary, and 
the sight of the half-tended kitchen and neglected fire—they 
j)aid a neighbor to do the housework, as far as the care of her 
own seven children would let her—suddenly revived in his 
slippery mind the mernoiy of his niece, who, with all her 
faults, had had the makings of a housewife, and for whom, 
in spite of her flouts and jeers, he had always cherished a 
secret admiration. As he came in he noticed that the door 
to the left hand, leading into what Westmoreland folk call 
the ‘‘ house ” or sitting-room of the farm, was open. The 
room had hardl}^ been used since Mary’s flight, and the few 
pieces of black oak and shining mahogany which adorned it 
had long ago fallen from their pristine polish. The gera¬ 
niums and fuclisias with which she had filled the window all 
the summer before had died into dry, blackened stalks ; an<f 
the dust lay heavy on the room, in spite of the well-meant 
but wliolly ineffective efforts of the char-woman next door. 
The two old men had avoided the place for months past 


152 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


by common consent, and the door into it was hardly ever 
opened. 

Now, however, it stood ajar, and old Jim going up to shut 
it, and looking in, was struck dumb with astonishment. For 
there on a wooden rocking-chair, which had been her mother’s 
favorite seat, sat Mary Backhouse, her feet on the curved 
brass fender, her eyes staring into the parlor grate. Her 
clothes, her face, her attitude of cowering chill and mortal 
fatigue, produced an impression which struck through the 
old man’s dull senses, and made him tremble so that his hand 
dropped from the handle of the door. The slight sound 
roused Mary, and she turned toward him. She said nothing 
for a few seconds, her hollow, black eyes fixed upon him ; 
then with a ghastly smile, and a voice so hoarse as to be 
scarcely audible : 

“ Weel, aa’ve coom back. Ye’d may be not expect me?” 

There was a sound behind on the cobbles outside the 
kitchen door. 

“ Yur feyther ! ” cried Jim between his teeth. ‘‘ Gang 
upstairs wi’ ye.” And he pointed to a door in the wall 
concealing a staircase to the upper story. 

She sprang up, looked at the door and at him irresolutely, 
and then stayed where she was, g^aunt, pale, fever-eyed, the 
wreck and ghost of her old self. 

The steps neared. There was a rough voice in the kitchen, 
a surprised exclamation, and her father had pushed past his 
brother into the room. 

John Backhouse no sooner saw his daughter than his dull, 
weather-beaten face flamed into violence. With an oath he 
raised the heavy whip he held in his hand, and flung himself 
toward her. 

“Naw, ye’ll not du’at!” cried Jim, throwing himself with 
all his feeble strength on to his brother’s arm. John swore 
and struggled, but the old man stuck like a limpet. 

“ You let ’un aleann,” said Mary, drawing her tattered 
shawl over her breast. “ If he aims to kill me, aa’ll not say 
naa. But he needn’t moider hisself ! There’s them abuve as 
ha’ taken care o’ that ! ” 

She sank again into her chair, as though her limbs could 
not support her, and her eyes closed in the utter indifference 
of a fatigue which had made even fear impossible. 

The father’s arm dropped ; he stood there sullenly looking 
at her. Jim, thinking she had fainted, went up to her, took 
a glass of water out of which she had already been drinkino- 
from the mahogany table, and held it to her lips. She drank 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


153 


a little, and then with a desperate effort raised herself, and 
clutching the arm of the chair, faced her father. 

“ Ye’ll not hev to wait lang. Doan’t ye fash yerseP. Maj^- 
be it nil comfort ye to knaw siimat! Lasst Midsummer-da^^ 
aa was on t’ Shan mo or road, i’t’ gloaming. An’ aa saw theer 
t’ bogle—thee knaws, t’ bogle o’ Bleacliff Tarn ; an’ she turned 
herseP, and she spoak to me !” 

She uttered the last words with a grim emphasis, dwelling 
on each, the whole life of the wasted face concentrated in 
the terrible black eyes, which gazed past the two figures 
within their immediate range into a vacancy peopled with 
horror. Then a film came over them, the grip relaxed, and 
she fell back with a lurch of the rOcking-chair in a dead 
swoon. 

With the help of the neighbor from next door, Jim got her 
upstairs into the room that had been hers. She awoke from 
her swoon only to fall into the torpid sleep of exhaustion, 
which lasted for twelve hours. 

‘‘ Keep her oot o’ ma way,” said the father with an oath to 
Jim, “ 04 * aa’ll not answer nayther for her nor me ! ” 

She needed no telling. She soon crept downstairs again, 
and went to the task of house-cleaning. The two men Ifved 
in the kitchen as before ; when they were at home she ate and 
sat in the parlor alone. Jim watched her as far as his dull 
brain was capable of watching, and he dimly understood that 
she was dying. Both men, indeed, felt a sort of superstitious 
awe of her, she was so changed, so unearthl3^ As for the story 
of the ghost, the old popular superstitions are almost dead in 
the Cumbrian mountains, and the shrewd north-country peas¬ 
ant is in many places quite as scornfully read}^ to sacrifice his 
ghost to the Time Spirit as any ‘‘ bold, bad ” haunter of scien¬ 
tific associations could wish him to be. But in a few of the 
remoter valleys they still linger, though beneath the surface. 
Either of the Backhouses or Mary in her days of health would 
have suffered many things rather than allow a stranger to 
suppose they placed the smallest credence in the story of 
Bleacliff Tarn. But, all the same, the story which each had 
heard in childhood, on stormy nights perhaps, when the moun¬ 
tain-side was awful with the sounds of tempest, had grown up 
with them, had entered deep into the tissue of consciousness. 
In Mary’s imagination the ideas and images connected with it 
had now, under the stimulus of circumstance, become instinct 
with a living, pursuing terror. But they were present, though 
in a duller, blunter state, in the minds of her father and uncle ; 
and as the weeks passed on, and the days lengthened toward 


154 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


midsummer, a sort of brooding horror seemed to settle on the 
liouse. 

Mary grew weaker and weaker ; her cough kept Jim awake 
at night ; once or twice wlien he went to help her with a piece 
of work which not even her extraordinary will could carry her 
through, her hand burned him like a hot cinder. But she kept 
all other women out of the house by her mad, strange ways ; 
and if her uncle showed any consciousness of her state, she 
turned upon him with her old temper, which had lost all its 
former stormy grace, and had become ghastly b}^ the contrast 
it brought out between the tempestuous, vindictive soul and 
the shaken weakness of frame. 

A doctor would have discovered at once that what was 
wrong with her was phthisis, complicated with insanity ; and 
the insanity, instead of taking the hopeful optimistic tinge 
which is characteristic of the insanity of consumption, had 
rather assumed the color of the events from which the disease 
itself had started. Cold, exposure, long-continued agony of 
mind and body—tlie madness intertwined with an illness which 
had such roots as these was naturally a madness of ciespair. 
One of its principal signs was the fixed idea as to Midsummer- 
day. It never occured to her as possible that her life should 
be prolonged beyond that limit. Every night, as she dragged 
herself up the steep little staircase to her room, she checked off 
the day which had just passed from the days she had still to 
live. She had made all her arrangements ; she had even sewed 
with her own hands, and that without any sense of special 
horror, but rather in the provident peasant way, the dress in 
which she was to be carried to the grave. 

At last one day, her father, coming unexpectedly into the 
yard, saw her carrying a heavy pail of water from the pump. 
Something stirred within him, and he went up to her and forci¬ 
bly took it from her. Their looks met, and her poor mad ej^es 
gazed intensely into his. As he moved forward toward the 
house she crept after him, passing him into the parlor, where 
she sunk down breathless on the settle where she had been 
sleeping for the last few nights, rather than face climbing the 
stairs. For the first time he followed her, watching her gasp¬ 
ing struggle for breath, in spite of her impatient motion to 
him to go. After a few seconds he left her, took his hat, went 
out, saddled his horse, and rode off to Whinborough. lie got 
Dr. Baker to promise to come over on the morrow, and on his 
way back he called and requested to see Catherine Leyburn. 
lie stammeringly asked her to come and visit his daughter, 
who was ill and lonesome, and when she consented gladly he 


ROBERT ELSMBRE. 


155 


went on his way, feeling a load olf his mind. What he had just 
done had been due to an undefined, but still vehement, prompt¬ 
ing conscience. It did not make it any the less probable that 
the girl would die on or before Midsummer-day ; but suppos¬ 
ing the story were true, it absolved him from any charge of 
assistance to the designs of those grisly powers in whose clutch 
she was. 

AA'hen the doctor came next morning a change for the 
worse had taken place, and she was too feeble actively to 
resent his appearance. She lay there on the settle, every now 
and then making superhuman efforts to get up, which gen¬ 
erally ended in a swoon. She refused to take any medicine, 
would hardly take any food, and to the doctor’s questions she 
returned no answer whatever. In the same way, when 
Catherine came, she would be absolutely silent, looking at 
her with glittering, feverish eyes, but taking no notice at all, 
whether she read or talked, or simply sat quietly beside her. 

After the silent period, as the days went on, and Midsummer- 
day drew nearer, there supervened a period of intermittent de¬ 
lirium. In the evenings, especially when her temperature 
rose, she became talkative and incoherent, and Catherine 
would sometimes tremble as she caught the sentences which, 
little by little, built up the girl’s hidden tragedy before her 
eyes. London streets, London lights, London darkness, the 
agony of an endless wandering, the little, clinging, puny life, 
which could never be stilled or satisfied, biting cold, intoler¬ 
able pain, the cheerless work-house order, and, finally, the 
arms without a burden, the breast without a child—these 
were the sharp fragments of experience, so common, so terri¬ 
ble to the end of time, which rose on the troubled surface 
of Mary Backhouse’s delirium, and smote the tender heart of 
the listener. 

Then in the mornings she would lie suspicious and silent, 
watching Catherine’s face with the long gaze of exhaustion, 
as though trying to find out from it whether her secret had 
escaped her. The doctor, who had gathered the story of the 
“ bogle ” from Catherine, to whom Jim had told it briefly 
and reluctantly, and with an absolute reservation of his own 
views on the matter, recommended that if possible they should 
try and deceive her as to the date of the day and month. 
Mere nervous excitement might, he thought, be enough to 
kill her when the actual day came round. But all their 
attempts were useless. Nothing distracted the intense sleep¬ 
less attention with which the darkened mind kept always in 
view that one absorbing ex2)ectation. Words fell from her 


156 


ROBERT ELBMERE. 


at night which seemed to show that she expected a summons— 
a voice along the fell, calling her spirit into the dark. And 
then would come the shriek, the struggle to get loose, the 
choked waking, the wandering, horror-stricken eyes, subsid¬ 
ing by degrees into the old silent watch. 

On the morning of the 23 d, when Robert, sitting at his 
work, was looking at Burwood through the window in the 
flattering belief that Catherine was the captive of the weather, 
she had spent an hour or more with Mary Backhouse, and the 
austere influences of the visit had perhaps had more share 
than she knew in determining her own mood that day. The 
world seemed such dross, the pretenses of personal happiness 
so hollow and delusive, after such a sight ! The girl lay 
dying fast, with a look of extraordinary attentiveness in her 
face, hearing every noise, every footfall, and, as it seemed to 
Catherine, in a mood of inward joy. She took, moreover, 
some notice of her visitor. As a rough tomboy of fourteen, 
she had shown Catherine, who had taught her in the school 
sometimes, and had especially won her regard on one occasion 
by a present of some article of dress, a good many uncouth 
signs of affection. On the morning in question Catherine 
fancied she saw something of the old childish expression 
once or twice. At any rate there was no doubt her presence 
was soothing, as she read in her low, vibrating voice, or sat 
silently stroking the emaciated hand, raising it every now and 
then to her lips with a rush of that intense pitifulness which 
was to her the most natural of all moods. 

The doctor, whom she met there, said that this state of calm 
was ver}^ possibly only transitoiy. The night had been passed 
in a succession of paroxysms, and they were almost sure to re¬ 
turn upon her, especially as he could get her to swallow none 
of the sedatives which might have carried her in unconscious¬ 
ness past the fatal moment. She would have none of them ; 
he thought that she was determined to allow of no encroach¬ 
ments on the troubled remnants of intelligence still left to her; 
so the only thing to be done was to wait and see the result. 
‘‘ I will come to-morrow,” said Catherine briefly; “ for the 
day certainly, longer if necessary.” She had long ago estab¬ 
lished her claim to be treated seriously as a nurse, and Dr. 
Baker made no objection, ‘‘^she lives so long,” he said, 
dubiously. “ The Backhouses and Mrs. Irwin ” [the neighbor] 
“ shall be close at hand. I will come in the afternoon and 
try to get her to take an opiate ; but I can’t give it her by 
force, and there is not the smallest chance of her consenting 
to it.” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


157 


All through Catherine’s own struggle and pain during these 
two days the image of the dying girl had lain at her heart. 
It served her as the crucifix serves the Roinanist ; as she 
pressed it into her thought, it recovered from time to time 
the failing forces of the will. Need* life be empty because 
self was left unsatisfied ? Now, as she neared the hamlet, the 
quality of her nature reasserted itself. The personal want 
tugging at her senses, the ])ersonal soreness, the cry of resent¬ 
ful love, were silenced. What place had they in the presence 
of this lonely agony of death, this mystery, this opening be¬ 
yond ? The old heroic mood revived in her. Her step grew 
swifter, her carriage more erect, and as she entered the farm 
kitchen she felt herself once more ready in spirit for what lay 
before her. 

From the next room there came a succession of husky, sibi¬ 
lant sounds, as though some one were whispering hurriedly 
and continuously. 

After her subdued greeting she looked inquiringly at Jim. 

“ She’s in a taaking way,” said Jim, who looked more atten¬ 
uated and his face more like a pink and white parchment than 
ever. “She’s been knacking an’taaking a long while. She 
woan’t know ye. Luk ye,” he continued, dropping his voice 
as he opened the “house” door for her ; “ef you want ayder 
ov oos, you jest call oot—sharj)! Mrs. Irwin, she’ll stay in 
wi’ ye—she’s not afeerd ! ” 

The superstitious excitement which the looks and gestures 
of the old man expressed touched Catherine’s imagination,- 
and she entered the room with an inward shiver. 

Mary Backhouse lay raised high on her pillows, talking to 
herself or to imaginary other persons, with eyes wide open 
but vacant, and senses conscious of nothing but the dream'* 
world in which the mind was wandering. Catherine sat softly 
down beside her, unnoticed, thankful for the chances of 
disease. If this delirium lasted till the ghost hour—the time 
of twilight, that is to say, which would begin about half-past 
eight, and the duration of which would depend on the cloudi¬ 
ness of the evening—was over, or, better still, till midnight 
were passed, the strain on the girl’s agonized senses might be 
relieved, and death come at last in softer, kinder guise. 

“ Has she been long like this ? ” she asked, softly, of the 
neighbor Avho sat quietly knitting by the evening liglit. 

The woman looked up and thought. 

“Ay ! ” she said. “ Aa came in at tea-time, an’ she’s been 
maistly taakin ivver sence ! ” 

The incoherent whisperings and restless movements, which 


158 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


obliged Catherine constant!}^ to replace the coverings over 
the poor wasted and fevered body, went on for some time. 
Catherine noticed presently, with a little thrill, that the light 
was beginning to change. The weather was growing darker 
and stormier ; the wind shook the house in gusts : and the 
further shoulder of High Fell, seen in distorted outline 
through the casemented window, was almost hidden by the 
trailing rain clouds. The mournful western light coming 
from behind the house struck the river here and there ; 
almost everything else was gray and dark. A mountain ash, 
just outside the window, brushed the panes every now and 
then ; and in the silence every surrounding sound—the rare 
movements in the next room, the voices of quarreling/3hildren 
round the door of a neighboring house, the far-olf barking of 
dogs—made itself distinctly audible. 

Suddenly Catherine, sunk in painful reverie, noticed that the 
mutterings from the bed had ceased for some little time. She 
turned her chair, and was startled to find those weird eyes 
fixed with recognition on herself. There was a curious malign 
intensity, a curious triumph in them. 

“ It must be—eight o’clock,” said the gasping voice—“ eight 
d*clock, and the tone became a whisper, as though the idea 
thus half involuntarily revealed had been drawn jealously 
back into the strongholds of consciousness. 

“ Mary,” said Catherine, falling on her knees beside the bed, 
and taking one of the restless hands forcibly into her own, 
“ can’t you put this thought away from you ? We are not the 
playthings of evil spirits—we are the children of God ! We 
are in his hands. No evil thing can harm us against his 
will! ” 

It was the first time for many days she had spoken openly 
of the thought which was in the minds of all, and her whole 
pleading soul was in her pale, beautiful face. There was no 
response in the sick girl’s countenance, and again that look of 
trium])h, of sinister exultation. They had tried to cheat her 
into sleeping, and living, and in spite of them, at the supreme 
moment, every sense was awake and expectant. To what was 
the materialized peasant imagination looking forward ? To 
an actual call, an actual following to the free mountain-side, 
the rush of the wind, the phantom figure floating on before 
her, bearing her into the heart of the storm? Dread was 
gone, pain was gone ; there was only rapt excitement and 
fierce anticipation. 

“ Mary,” said Catherine again, mistaking her mood for one 
of tense defiance and despair, “Mary, if I were to go out now 


IcuBmT EL8MERE, 


159 


and leave Mrs. Irwin with you, and if I were to go up all the 
way to the top of Shannioss and back again, and if I could 
tell you there was nothing there, nothing—if I were to stay 
out till the dark has come—it will be here in half an hour— 
and you could be quite sure when you saw me again that 
there was nothing near jou but the dear old hills, and the 
])Ower of God, could you believe me and try and rest and 
sleep ? ’’ ■ 

Mary looked at her intently. If Catherine could have seen 
clearly in the dim light she would have caught something of 
the cunning of madness slipping into the dying woman’s 
expression. While she waited for the answer there was a 
noise in the kitchen outside, an opening of the outer door, 
and a voice. Catherine’s heart stood still. She had to make 
a superhuman effort to keep her attention fixed on Mary. 

“ Go ! ” said the hoarse whisper close beside her, and the 
girl lifted her wasted hand, and pushed her visitor from her. 
“ Go ! ” it repeated insistently, with a sort of wild beseech¬ 
ing ; then, brokenly, the gasping breath interrupting, “ There’s 
naw fear—naw fear—fur the likes o’ you ! ” 

Catherine rose. 

“ I’m not afraid,” she said gently, but her hand shook as 
she pushed her chair back ; ‘‘ God is everywhere, Mary.” 

She put on her hat and cloak, said something in Mrs. Irwin’s 
ear, and stooped to kiss the brow which to the shuddering 
sense under her will seemed already cold and moist with the 
sweats of death. Mary watched her go; Mrs. Irwin, with 
the air of one bewildered, drew her chair nearer to the settle ; 
and the light of the fire, shooting and dancing through the 
June twilight, threw such fantastic shadows over the face on 
the pillow that all expression was lost. What was moving in 
the crazed mind ? Satisfaction, perhaps, at having got rid 
of one witness, one jailer, one of the various antagonistic 
forces surrounding her ? She had a dim frenzied notion she 
should have to fight for her liberty when the call came, and 
she lay tense and rigid, waiting—the images of insanity whirl¬ 
ing through her brain, while the light slowly, slowly waned. 

Catherine opened the door into the kitchen. The two car¬ 
riers were standing there, and Robert Elsmere also stood with 
his back to her, talking to them in an undertone. 

He turned at the sound behind him, and his start brought 
a sudden flush to Catherine’s cheek. Her face, as the candle¬ 
light struck it amid the shadows of the doorway, was like an 
angelic vision to him—the heavenly calm of it just exquisitely 
broken by the wonder, the shock, of his presence. 


160 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


“You here?” he cried, coining up to her, and taking lier 
hand—what secret instinct guided liim ?—close in both of 
his. “ I never dreamt of it—so late. My cousin sent me 
over—she wished for news.” 

She smiled involuntarily. It seemed to her she had ex¬ 
pected this in some sort all along. But her self-possession 
W'as complete. 

“ The excited state may be over in a short time now,” she 
answered hini in a quiet whisper ; “ but at present it is at its 
height. It seemed to please her”—and withdrawing her 
hand she turned to John Backhouse—“ when I suggested that 
I should walk up to Shanmoss and back. I said I would come 
back to her in half an hour or so, when the daylight was 
quite gone, and prove to her there was nothing on the path.” 

A hand caught her arm. It was Mrs. Irwin, holding the 
door close with the other hand. 

“Miss Leyburn—Miss Catherine! Yur not gawin’ oot— 
not gawin' oop that path ?” The woman was fond of Cather¬ 
ine, and looked deadly frightened. 

“ Yes, I am, Mrs. Irwin—but I shall be back very soon. 
Don’t leave her ; go back.” And Catherine motioned her 
back with a little peremptory gesture. 

“Doan’t ye let ’ur, sir,” said the woman, excitedly, to Rob¬ 
ert. “ One’s eneuf, aa’m thinking.” And she pointed with a 
meaning gesture to the room behind her. 

Robert looked at Catherine, who was moving toward the 
outer door. 

“ I’ll go with her,” he said ^hastily, his face lighting up. 
“There is nothing whatever to be afraid of, only don’t leave 
your patient.” 

Catherine trembled as she heard the words, but she made 
no sign, and the two men and the woman watched their depar¬ 
ture with blank, uneasy wonderment. A second later they 
were on the fell-side climbing a rough stony path, which in 
places was almost a water-course, and which wound up the fell 
toward a tract of level swampy moss or heath, beyond which 
lay the descent to Shanmoor. Daylight was almost gone 
the stormy yellow west was being fast swallowed up in cloud ; 
below them as they climbed la^^ the dark group of houses 
with a light twinkling here and there. About them w'ere 
black mountain forms ; a desolate, tempestuous wind drove a 
gusty rain into their faces'; a little beck roared beside them,, 
and in the distance from the black gulf of the valley the: 
swollen river thundered. , 

Elsmere looked down on his companion with an indescriba- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


IGl 


ble exultation, a passionate sense of possession which could 
hardly restrain itself. lie had come back that morning with 
a mind clearly made up. Catherine had been blind indeed 
when she supposed that any plan of his or hers would have 
been allowed to stand in the way of that last wrestle with her, 
of which he had planned all the methods, rehearsed all the 
arguments. But when he reached the vicarage he was greet¬ 
ed Avith the news of her absence. She Avas inaccessible, it 
appeared, for the day. No matter ! The vicar and he settled 
in the feAvest possible Avords that he should stay till Monday, 
Mrs. Tliornburgh meauAvhile looking on, saying what civility 
demanded, and surprisingly little else. Then in the eA'^ening 
Mrs. Thornburgh had asked of him Avith a manner of admira¬ 
ble indifference Avhether he felt inclined for an evening Avalk 
to High Ghyll to inquire after Mary Buckhouse. The request 
fell in excellently Avith a loA’^er’s restlessness, and Robert as¬ 
sented at once. The vicar saAV him go Avith puzzled broAvs 
and a quick look at his Avife, Avhose liead Avas bent close over 
her Avorsted Avork. 

It never occurred to Elsmere—or if it did occur he pooh- 
poohed the notion—that he should find Catherine still at her 
post far from home on this dark, stormy evening. But in the 
gloAv of joy Avhich her presence had brought him he was still 
capable of all sorts of delicate perceptions and reasonings. 
Ilis quick imagination carried him through the scene from 
Avhich she had just momentarily escaped. He had understood 
the exaltation of her look and tone. If love spoke at all, 
ringed Avith such surrounding, it must be Avith its most inward 
and spiritual voice, as those speak Avho feel “ the Eternities ” 
about them. 

But the darkness hid her from him so Avell that he had to 
feel out the situation for himself. He could not trace it in 
her face. 

AYe must go right up to the top of the pass,’’ she said to 
him, as he held a gate open for her which led them into a 
piece of larch plantation on the mountain-side. “ The ghost is 
supjDosed to Avalk along this bit of road above the houses, till 
it reaches the heath on the top, then it turns tOAvard Bleacliff 
Tarn, which lies higher up to the right, under High Fell.” 

“ Do you imagine your report will have any effect ? ” 

“At any rate,” she said, sighing, “it seemed to me that it 
might divert her thoughts a little from the actual horror of 
her OAvn summons. Anything is better than the torture of 
that one fixed idea as she lies there.” 

“ What is tliat ? ” said Robert, startled a little by some 


162 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


ghostly sounds in front of them. The little wood was almost 
dark, and he could see nothing. 

“ Only a horse trotting on in front of us,” said Catherine ; 
“our voices frightened him, I suppose. We shall be out on 
the fell again directly.” 

As they quitted the trees a dark, bulky form to the left 
suddenly lifted a shadowy head from the grass, and clattered 
down the slope. 

A cluster of white-stemmed birdies just ahead of them 
caught whatever light was still left in the atmosphere, their 
feathery tops bending and swaying against the sky. 

“ How easily, with mind attuned, one could people this 
whole path with ghosts ! ” said Robert. “ Look at those 
stems, and that line of stream coming down to the right, and 
listen to the wind among the fern.” 

For they were passing a little gully deep in bracken, up 
which the blast was tearing its tempestuous way. 

Catherine shivered a little, and the sense of physical exhaus¬ 
tion, which had been banished like eveiything else—doubt, 
humiliation, bitterness—by the one fact of his presence, 
came back on her. 

“ There is something rather awful in this dark and storm,” 
she said, and paused. 

“Would you have faced it alone?” he asked, his voice 
thrilling her with a hundred different meanings. “ I am glad 
I prevented it.” 

“I have no fear of the mountains,” she said, trembling. 
“ I know them, and they me.” 

“But you are tired—your voice is tired—and the walk 
might have been more of an effort than y^u thought it. Do 
you never think of yourself ? ” 

“ Oh, dear, yes,” said Catherine, trying to smile, and could 
find nothing else to say. They walked on a few moments in 
silence, splashes of rain breaking in their faces. Robert’s 
inward excitement was growing fast. Suddenly Catherine’s 
pulse stood still. She felt her hand lifted, drawn within his 
arm, covered close with his warm trembling clasp. 

“ Catherine, let it stay there. Listen one moment. You 
gave me a hard lesson yesterday, too hard—I can not learn 
it—I am bold—I claim you. Be ny^ wife. Help me through 
this difficult world. I have loved you from the first moment. 
Come to me. Be kind to me.” 

She could hardly see his face, but she could feel the passion 
in his voice and touch. Her cheek seemed to droop against 
his arm. He felt her tottering. 


IlOBEUT ELSMERE. 


163 


‘‘ Let me sit down,” slie said ; and after one’ moment of 
dizzy silence he guided her to a rock, sinking down himself 
beside her, longing, but not daring, to shelter her under his 
broad Inverness cloak against the storm. 

‘‘ I told you,” she said, almost whispering, that I was 
bound, tied to others.” 

“ I do not admit your plea,” he said, passionately ; “ no, 
not for a moment. For two days have I been tramping over 
tlie mountains thinking it out for yourself and me. Cather¬ 
ine, your mother has no son—she should find one in me. I 
have no sisters—give me yours. I Avill cherish them as any 
brother could. Come and enrich my life ; you shall still fill 
and shelter theirs. I dare not think what my future miglit 
be without you to guide, to inspire, to bless—dare not, lest 
with a word you should plunge me into an outer darkness I 
can not face.” 

lie caught her unresisting hand, and raised it to his lips. 

“ Is there no sacredness,” he said, brokenly, “ in the fate 
that has brought us together—out of all the world—here in 
the lonely valley ? Come to me, Catherine. You shall never 
fail tlie old ties, I promise you ; and new hands shall cling to 
you—new voices shall call you blessed.” 

Catherine could hardly breathe. Every word had been like 
balm upon a wound—like a ray of intense light in the gloom 
about them. Oh, where was this softness bearing her—this 
emptiness of all will, of all individual power? She hid her 
eyes with her other hand, struggling to recall that far-away 
moment in Marrisdale. But the mind refused to work. Con¬ 
sciousness seemed to retain nothing but the warm grasp of 
his hand—the tones of his voice. 

He saw her struggle, and pressed on remorselessly. 

“ Speak to me—say one little kind word. Oh, you can not 
send me away miserable and empty ! ” 

She turned to him, and laid her trembling free hand on his 
arm. He clasped them both with rapture. 

Give me a little time.” 

“ No, no,” he said, and it almost seemed to her that he was 
smiling ; “ time for you to escape me again, my wild moun¬ 
tain bird : time for you to think yourself and me into all 
sorts of moral mists ! No, you shall not have it. Here, alone 
with God and the dark—bless me or undo me. Send me out 
to the work of life maimed and sorrowful, or send me out 
your knight, your possession, pledged—” 

But his voice failed him. AYliat a note of youth, of im¬ 
agination, of impulsive eagerness there was through it alh 


164 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


The more slowly moving inarticulate nature was swept away 
by it. There was but one object clear to her in tlie whole 
world of tliouglit or sense, everything else had sunk out of 
sight—drowned in a luminous mist. 

He rose and stood before her as he delivered his ultimatum, 
his tall form drawn up to its full height. In the east, across 
the valley, above the further buttress of High Fell,.there was 
a clearer strip of sky, visible for a moment among the moving 
storm-clouds, and a dim lialoed moon shone out in it. Far 
away a white-walled cottage glimmered against the fell ; the 
pools at their feet shone in the w^eird passing light. 

She lifted her head, and looked at him, still irresolute. 
Then she too rose, and helplessly, like some one impelled by 
a will not her own, she silently held out to him two white 
trembling hands. 

“ Catherine—my angel—my wife ! ” 

There was something in the pale virginal grace of look and 
form which kept his young passion in awe. But he bent his 
head again over those yielded hands, kissing them wdth dizzy, 
unspeakable joy. 

About twenty minutes later Catherine and Robert, having 
huri-ied back with all speed from the top of Shanmoss, reached 
the farm-house door. She knocked. No one answered. She 
tried the lock ; it yielded, and they entered. No one in the 
kitchen. She looked disturbed and conscience-stricken. 

“ Oh ! ”■ she cried to him, under her breath : “ have we 
been too long ? ” And hurrying into the inner room she left 
him waiting. 

Inside was a mournful sight. The two men and Mrs. Irwin 
stood close round the settle, but as she came nearer, Catherine 
saw Mary Backhouse lying panting on her j^illows, her breath 
coming in l^id gasps, her dress and all the coverings of the 
bed showing signs of disorder and confusion, her black hair 
tossed about her. 

“ It’s bin awfu’ work sence you left, miss,” whispered Mrs. 
Irwin to Catherine, excitedly, as she joined them. ‘‘ She 
thowt she heerd soombody fleytin’ and callin’—it was t’ wind 
came skirlin’ round t’ place, an’ she aw’ but thrown hirsel’ oot 
o’ t’ bed, an’ aa shooted for Jim, and they came, and they and 
I—it’s bin as much as we could a’ du to hod ’er.” 

“ Luke I -Steady ! ” exclaimed Jim. ‘‘ She’ll try it again.” 

For the hands Avere moving reji;tlessh^ from side to side, and 
the face was working again. There Avas one more desperate 
effort fo .rise^ which the tAVO men checked—gently enough, 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


165 


but effectually—and then the exhaustion seemed complete. 
The lids fell, and the struggle for breath was pitiful. 

Catherine flew for some drugs which the doctor had left, 
and shown her how to use. After some twenty minutes thej^ 
seemed to give relief, and the great haunted e^^es opened 
once more. 

Catherine held barley-water to the parched lips, and Maiy 
drank mechanically, her gaze still intently fixed on her nurse. 
AVhen Catherine put down the glass the eyes followed her 
with a question which the lips had no power to frame. 

“ Leave her now a little,” said Catherine to the others. 
“ The fewer people and the more air the better. And please 
let the door be open ; the room is too hot.” 

They went out silentl^q and Catherine sank down beside- 
the bed. Her heart went out in unspeakable longing toward 
the poor human wreck before her. For her there was no 
morrow possible, no dawn of other and softer skies. All was 
over; life was lived, and all its heavenly capabilities missed 
forever. Catherine felt her OAvn joy hurt her, and her tears, 
fell fast. 

“Maiy,” she said, laying her face close beside the chill face 
on the pillow, “ Mary, I went out ; I climbed all the ])ath as 
far as Shanmoss. There was nothing evil there. Oh, I must 
tell you ! Oa?i I make 3^011 understand ? I want 3^011 to feel 
that "it is onl3^ God and love that are real. Oh, think of them 1 . 
He would not let 3^011 be hurt and terrified in your pain, poor 
Maiy. He loves 3^11. He is waiting to comfort you—to set 
you free from pain forever ; and he has sent 3^011 a sign b3" 
me.” . . . She lifted her head from the pillow, trembling 

and hesitating. Still that feverish, questioning gaze on the 
face beneath her, as it la3^ in deep shadow cast by a light on: 
the window-sill some paces awa3^ 

“You sent me out, Mary, to search for something, the- 
thought of which has been tormenting and torturing 3^011. 
YouTihought God would let a dark, lost spirit trouble 3^11 and 
take you away from him—you, his child, whom he made- 
and whom he loves ! And listen ! While you thought you, 
were sending me out to face the evil thing, you were reall3r 
my kind angel—God’s messenger—sending me to meet the 
joy of my whole life ! There was some one waiting here just 
now,” she went on hurriedl3q breathing her sobbing words, 
into Mary’s ear. “ Some one who has loved me, and whom I 
love. But I had made him sad, and myself ; then when you 
sent me out he came, too ; we walked up that path, you re¬ 
member, beyond the larch-wood, up to the top, where the; 


160 


llOBERT ELSMEltE. 


stream goes under the road. And there lie spoke to me, and 
I couldn’t help it any more. And I promised to love him 
and be his wife. And if it hadn’t been for you, Mary, it 
would never have happened. God had put it into your hand, 
this joy, and I bless you for it ! Oh, and Mary—Mary—it is 
only for a little while this life of ours ! Nothing matters— 
not our worst sin and sorrow—but God, and our love to him. 

I shall meet you some day—I pray I may—in his sight and 
all will be well, the pain all forgotten—all! ” 

She raised herself again and looked down with yearning, 
passionate pity on the shadowed form. Oh, blessed answer 
of heart to heart ! There were tears forming under the 
heavy lids, the corners of the lips were relaxed and soft. 
Slowly the feeble hand sought her own. She waited in an 
intense, expectant silence. 

There was a faint breathing from the lips ; she stooped and 
caught it. 

“Kiss me ! ” said the whisper ; and she laid her soft, fresh 
lips to the parched mouth of the dying. When she lifted her 
head again IMary still held her hand ; Catherine softly 
stretched out hers for the opiate Dr. Baker had left ; it 
was swallowed without resistance, and a quiet to which the 
invalid had been a sti’anger for days stole little by little over 
the wasted frame. The grasp of the fingers relaxed, the la- 
])ored breath came more gently, and in a few more minutes 
she slept. Twilight was long over. The ghost-hour was 
passed, and the moon outside was slowly gaining a wider em¬ 
pire in the clearing heavens. 

It was a little after ten o’clock when Rose drew aside the 
curtain at Burford and looked out. 

“ There is the lantern,” she said to Agnes, “ just by the 
vicarage. How the night has cleared ! ” 

She turned back to her book. Agnes was writing letters. 
Mrs. Leyburn was sitting b}^ the bit of fire that was generally 
lighted for her benefit in the evenings, her white shawl drop- 
])ing gracefully about her, a copy of the Cornhill on her lap. 
Jbit she was not reading, she was meditating, and the girls 
thought her out of spirits. The hall door opened. 

“ There is some one with Catherine ! ” cried Rose, starting 
lip. Agnes suspended her letter. 

“Perhaps the vicar,” said Mrs. Leyburn, with a little sigh. 

A hand turned the drawing-room door, and in the doorway 
stood Elsmere. Rose caught a gray dress disappearing up 
the little stairs behind him. 


ROBERT ELtSMERE. 


167 


Elsmere’s look was enough for the two girls. They under¬ 
stood in an instant. Rose flushed all over. The first contact 
Avith love is intoxicating to any girl of eighteen, even though 
the romance he not hers. But Mrs. Leyburn sat beAvildered. 

Elsmere went up to her, stooped and took her hand. 

“ Will you give her to me, Mrs. Leyburn ? ” he said, his 
boyish looks aglow, his voice unsteady. “ Will you let me be 
a son to you ? ” 

Mrs. Leyburn rose. He still held her hand. She looked 
up at him helplessl}^ 

“ Oh, Mr. Elsmere, Avhere is Catherine ! ’’ 

‘‘ I brought her home,” he said gently. “ She is mine, if 
you will it. Give her to me again ! ” 

Mrs. Leyburn’s face worked pitifully. The rectory and the 
wedding-dress, Avhich had lingered so regretfully in her 
thoughts since her last sight of Catherine, sank out of them 
altogether. 

“ She has been everything in the Avorld to us, Mr. Elsmere.” 

“ I know she has,” he said simply. “ She shall be every¬ 
thing in the Avorld to you still. I have had hard work to 
persuade her. There will be no chance for me if - you don’t 
help me.” 

Another breathless pause. Then Mrs. Leyburn timidly dreAV 
him to her, and he stooped his tall head and kissed her like 
a son. 

“ Oh, I must go to Catherine ! ” she said, hurrying aAvaj?", 
her pretty, withered cheeks Avet with tears. 

Then the girls threw tliemselves on Elsmere. The talk Avas 
all animation and excitement for the moment, not a tragic 
touch in it. It Avas as well perhaps that Catherine Avas not 
there to hear. 

“ I give you fair Avarning,’’ said Rose, as she bade him good¬ 
night, “ that I don’t know hoAV to behave to a brother. And 
I am equally sure that Mrs. Thornburgh doesn’t know hoAV to 
behave to a fiance.^’’ 

Robert threAV iq) his arms in mock terror at the name, and 
departed. 

‘‘We are abandoned,” cried Rose, flinging herself into the 
chair again—then Avith a little flash of self-irresolute Avicked- 
ness—“ and we are free ! Oh, I hope she Avill be happy ! ” 

And she caught Agnes wildly round the neck, as though 
she Avould droAvn her first words in her last. 

“ Madcap ! ” cried Agnes, struggling. “ Leave me at least 
a little breath to wish Catherine joy ! ” 

And they both fled upstairs. 


168 


llOBERT EL8MERE. 


There was indeed no prouder woman in the three kingdoms 
than Mrs. Thornburgh that night. After all the agitation 
downstairs, she could not persuade herself to go to bed. She 
first knocked up Sarah and communicated the news ; then 
she sat down before a pier-glass in her own room studying 
the person who had found Catherine Leyburii a husband. 

“My doing from beginning to end,” she cried wdth a tri¬ 
umph beyond words. “ William has had nothing to do with 
it. Robert ’has had scarcely as much. And to think how 
little I dreamed of it when I began ! Well, to be sure, no 
one could have planned marrying those two. There’s no one 
but Providence could have foreseen it—they’re so different. 
And after all it’s done. Now then, whom shall I have next 
year ? ” 


B 0 OK IL—S TIRREY. 

CHAPTER XI. 

Faeewell to the mountains ! 

The scene in which the next act of this unpretending history 
is to run its course is of a very different kind. In place of the 
rugged northern nature—a nature wild and solitary indeed, 
but still rich, luxuriant, and friendly to the senses of the trav¬ 
eler, even it its loneliest places. The heaths and woods of 
some districts of Surrey are scarcely more thickly peopled 
than the fells of Westmoreland ; the walker may wander for 
miles, and still enjoy an untamed, primitive earth, guiltless of 
boundary or furrow, the undisturbed home of all that grows and 
flies, where the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds live their life 
as they please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely 
little incommoded by his neighborhood. And yet there is 
nothing forbidding or austere in these Avide solitudes. Tlie 
patches of graceful birchwood ; the miniature lakes nestling 
among them ; the brakes of ling—pink, faintly scented, a feast 
for every sense ; the stretches of purple heather growing into 
scarlet under the touch of the sun ; the scattered farm-houses, 
so melloAV in color, so pleasant in outline ; the general softness 
and lavishness of the earth and all it bears, make these Surrey 
commons not a wilderness, but a paradise. Nature, indeed, 
here is like some spoiled, petulant child. She will bring forth 
nothing, or almost nothing, for man’s grosser needs. Ask her 
to bear corn or pasture flocks, and she Avill be miserly and 
grudging. But ask her only to be beautiful, enticing, capric- 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 


169 ' 


iously lovely, and she will throw herself into the task with all 
the abandonment, all the energy, that heart could wish. 

It is on the borders of one of the wilder districts of a county, 
Avhich is throughout a strange mixture of suburbanism and 
the desert, that we next meet with Robert and Catherine 
Elsmere. The rectory of Murewell occupied the highest point" 
of a gentle swell of ground which sloped through corn-fields' 
and woods to a plain of boundless heather on the south, and 
climbed away on the north toward the long chalk ridge of the 
Hog’s Back. It was a square white house pretending neither 
to beauty nor state, a little awkwardly and barely placed, with 
only a small stretch of grass and a low hedge between in and 
the road. A few tall firs climbing above the roof gave a little 
grace and clothing to its southern side, and behind it there 
was a garden sloping softly down toward the village at its 
foot—a garden chiefly noticeable for its grass walks, the lux¬ 
uriance of the fruit trees clinging to its old red walls, and the 
masses of pink and white phloxes which now in August gave 
it the floweriness and the gayety of an Elizabethan song. 
Below in the hollow and to the right lay the picturesque med¬ 
ley of the village—roofs and gables and chimneys, yellow-gray 
thatch, shining whitewash, and mellowed brick, making a 
bright patchwork among the softening trees, thin wreaths of 
blue smoke, like airy ribbons, tangled through it all. Rising 
over the rest was a house of some dignity. It had been an old 
manor house, now it was half-ruinous and the village inn. 
Some generations back the squire of the day had dismantled 
it, jealous that so big a house should exist in the same parish 
as the Hall, and the spoils of it had furnished the rectory ; so 
that the homely house was fitted inside with mahogany doors 
and carved cupboards fronts, in which Robert delighted, and 
in which even Catherine felt a proprietary pleasure. 

Altogether a quiet, rural, English spot. If the house had no 
beauty, it commanded a world of loveliness. All around it— 
north, south, and west—there spread, as it were, a vast play¬ 
ground of heather and wood and grassy common, in which the 
few workaday patches of hedge and plowed land seemed in¬ 
gulfed and lost. Close under the rectory windows, however, 
Avas a vast sloping cornfield, belonging to the glebe, the larg¬ 
est and fruitfulest of the neighborhood. At the present 
moment it was just ready for the reaper—the golden ears had 
clearly but a few more days or hours to ripple in the sun. It 
was bounded by a dark, summer-scorched belt of wood, and be¬ 
yond, over the distance, rose a blue-pointed hill, which seemed 
to be there only to attract and make a center for the sunset. 


170 


ROBEllT ELSMERE. 


As compared Avitli her Westmoreland life, the first twelve 
months of wifehood had been to Catherine Elsmere a time of 
rapid and changing experience. A few days out of their 
honeymoon had been spent at Oxford. It was a week before 
the opening of the October term, but many of the senior mem¬ 
bers of the university were already in residence, and the stag¬ 
nation of the long vacation was over. Langham Avas up ; so 
was Mr. Gre}^, and many another old friend of Robert’s. The 
bride and bridegroom were much feted in a quiet Avay. They 
dined in many common rooms and bursaries ; they were in¬ 
vited to many luncheons, Avhereat the superabundance of food 
and the length of time spent upon it made the Puritan Cath¬ 
erine uncomfortable ; and Langham devoted himself to taking 
the Avife through colleges and gardens, schools and Bodleian, 
in most orthodox fashion, indemnifying himself afterAvard for 
the sense of constraint her presence imposed upon him by a 
talk and a smoke Avith Robert. 

He could not understand the Elsmere marriage. That a 
creature so mobile, so sensitive, so susceptible as Elsmere 
should have fallen in love Avith this stately, silent Avoman, Avith 
her very evident rigidities of thought and training, Avas only 
another illustration of the mysteries of matrimony. He could 
not get on Avith her, and after a AAdiile did not try to do so. 

There could be no doubt as to Elsmere’s devotion. He Avas 
absorbed, Avrapped up in her. 

“ She has affected him,” thought the tutor, “at a period of 
life when he is more struck by the difficulty of being morally 
strong than by the difficulty of being intellectual clear. The 
touch of religious genius in her braces him like the breath of 
an Alpine AAund. One can see him expanding, gloAving under 
it. JBien ! sooner he than I. To be fair, hoAvever, let me re¬ 
member that she decidedly’ does not like me—Avhich may cut 
me off from Elsmere. IIoAvever”—and Langham sighed OA^er 
his fire—“Avhat have he and I to do Avith one another in the 
future ? By all the laws of character something untoward 
might come out of this marriage. But she Avill mold him, 
rather than he her. Besides, she will have children—and that 
solves most things.” 

MeaiiAAdiile, if Langham dissected the bride as he dissected 
most people, Robert, Aviththat keen observation which lay hid¬ 
den somewhere under his careless boyish Avays, noticed many 
])oints of change about his old friend. Langham seemed to him 
less human, more strange, than ever ; the points of contact be- 
tAveen him and active life Avere lessening in number term by 
term. He lectured only so far as Avas absolutely necessary 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


171 . 


for the retention of his post, and he spoke with wholesale dis¬ 
taste of his pupils, lie had set up a book on “ The Schools of 
Atl.ens,”hut when Robert saw the piles of disconnected notes 
already accumulated, he perfectly understood that the book 
was a mere blind, a screen, behind which a difficult, fastidious 
nature trifled and procrastinated as it pleased. 

Again, when Elsmere was an undergraduate Langham and 
Grey had been intimate. Now, Langham’s tone apropos of 
Gi-ey’s politics and Grey’s dreams of church reform was as 
languidly sarcastic as it was with regard to most of the strenu¬ 
ous things of life. “ Nothing particular is true,” his manner 
said, “ and all action is a degrading pis-ciller. Get through 
tlie day somehow, witli as little harm to yourself and other 
people as may be; do your duty if you like it, but, for heaven’s 
sake, don’t cant about it to other people ! ” 

If the affinities of cliaracter count for much, Catherine and 
Henry Grey should certainly have understood each other. 
The tutor liked the look of Elsmere’s wife. His kindly brown 
eyes rested on her with pleasure ; he tried in his shy but 
friendly way to get at her, and there was in both of them a 
touch of homeliness, a sheer power of unworldliness that 
should have drawn them together. And indeed Catherine 
felt the charm, the spell of this born leader of men. But she 
watched him with a sort of troubled admiration, puzzled, evi- 
dentlj^, by the halo of moral dignity surrounding him, which 
contended with something else in her mind respecting him. 
Some words of Robert’s, uttered very early in their acquaint¬ 
ance, had set her on her guard. Speaking of religion, Rob¬ 
ert had said : “ Grey is not one of us and Catherine, re¬ 
strained by a hundred ties of training and temperament, 
would not surrender herself, and could not if she would. 

Then had followed their home-coming to the rectory, and 
that first institution of their common life, never to be forgot¬ 
ten for the tenderness and the sacredness of it. Mrs. Elsmere 
had received them, and .had then retired to a little cottage of 
her own close by. She had of course already made the ac¬ 
quaintance of her daughter-in law, for she had been the Thorn¬ 
burgh’s guest for ten days before the marriage in September, 
and Catherine, moreover, had paid her a short visit earlier in 
the summer. But it was now that for the first time she real¬ 
ized to the full the character of the woman Robert had mar¬ 
ried. Catherine’s manner to her was sweetness itself. Parted 
from her own mother as she was, the younger woman’s strong 
filial instincts spent themselves in tending the mother who had 
been the guardian and life of Robert’s youth. And Mrs. Els- 


172 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


mere in return was awed by Catherine’s moral force and pur¬ 
ity of nature, and proud of her personal beauty, which waS so 
real, in spite of the severity of the type, and to which marriage 
liad given, at any rate for the moment, a certain added ioft- 
ness and brilliancy. ^ \ 

But there were ditficulties in the way. Catherine was alit- 
tle too apt to treat Mrs. Elsmere as she would have treated 
her own mother. But to be nursed and protected, to',be 
screened from draughts, and run after with shawls and stoils, 
was something wholly new and intolerable to Mrs. Elsm^’e. 
She could not away with it, and as soon as she had sufficien|,ly 
lost her first awe of her daughter-in-law she would revenge 
herself in all sorts of droll ways, and with occasional flashes ^>f 
petulant Irish wit which could make Catherine color and draV 
back. Then Mrs. Elsmere, touched with remorse, would catch 
her by the neck and give her a resounding kiss, which per¬ 
haps puzzled Catherine no less than her sarcasm of a minute 
before. 

Moreover, Mrs. Elsmere felt ruefully from the first that her 
new daughter was decidedly deficient in the sense of humor. 

“ I believe it’s that father of hers,” she would say to herself, 
crossly. “ By what Robert tells me of him he must have been 
one of the people who get ill in their minds for want of a good 
mouth-filling laugh now and then. The man who can’t amuse 
himself a bit out of the world is sure to get his head addled 
somehow, poor creature.” 

Certainly it needed a faculty of laughter to be always able 
to take MrSi Elsmere on the right side. For instance, Cath¬ 
erine was more often scandalized than impressed by her mother- 
in-law’s charitable performances. 

Mrs. Elsmere’s little cottage was filled with work-house 
orphans sent to her from different London districts. The 
training of these girls was the chief business of her life, and a 
very odd training it was, conducted in the noisiest way and 
on the most familiar terms. It was undeniable that the girls 
generally did well, and they invariably adored Mrs. Elsmere, 
but Catherine did not much like to think about them. Their 
household teaching under Mrs. Elsmere and her old servant 
Martha—as great an original as herself—was so irregular, their 
religious training so extraordinary, the clothes in which they 
were allowed to disport themselves so scandalous to the sober 
taste of the rector’s wife, that Catherine involuntarily re¬ 
garded the little cottage on the hill as a spot of misrule in the 
general order of the parish. She would go in, say, at eleven 
o’clock in the morning, and find her mother-in-law in bed, half 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


73 


dressed, with all her hand-maidens about her, giving her or¬ 
ders, reading her letters and the newspaper, cutting "out her 
girls’ frocks, instructing them in the fasliions, or "delivering 
litth homilies on questions suggested by the news of the day 
to tie more intelligent of them. The room the whole house, 
woild seem to Catherine in a detestable litter. If so, Mrs. 
Elsnere never apologized for it. On the contrary, as she 
sav Catherine sweep a mass of miscellaneous debris off a 
char in search of a seat, the small, bright eyes would twinkle 
with something that was certainly nearer amusement than 
shmie. 

A.nd in a hundred other ways Mrs. Elsmere’s relations with 
th3 poor of the parish often made Catherine miserable. She 
herself had the most angelic pity and tenderness for sorrows 
and sinners ; but sin was sin to her, and when she saw Mrs. 
Elsmere more than half attracted by the stronger_\dces, and 
in many cases more inclined to laugh with what ^s human 
in them than to weep over what was vile, Robert’s wife would 
go away and wrestle with herself, that she might be betrayed 
into nothing harsh toward Robert’s mother. 

But fate allowed their differences, whether they were deep or 
shallow, no time to develop. A week of bitter cold at the be¬ 
ginning of January struck down Mrs. Elsmere, whose strange 
ways of living were more the result of certain long-standing 
delicacies of health than she had ever allowed any one to im¬ 
agine. A few days of acute inflammation of the lungs, borne 
with a patience and heroism which showed the Irish character 
at its flnest—a moment of agonized wrestling with that terror 
of death which had haunted the keen, vivacious soul from its 
earliest consciousness, ending in a glow of spiritual victory— 
and Robert found himself motherless. He and Catherine had 
never left her since the beginning of the illness. In one 
of the intervals toward the end, when there was a faint 
power of speech, she drew Catherine’s cheek down to her and 
kissed her. 

“ God bless you ! ” the old woman’s voice said, with a solem¬ 
nity in it Avhich Robert knew well, but which Catherine had 
never heard before. “ Be good to him, Catherine—be ahvays 
good to him.’ 

And she lay looking from the husband to the wife with a 
certain Avistfulness which pained Catherine, she kneAv not 
why. But she answered with tears and tender Avords, and at 
last the mother’s face settled into a peace which death did 
but confirm. 

This great and unexpected loss, Avhich had shaken to their 


174 ROBERT ELSMERE. 

I 

depths all the feelings and affections of his youth, had throyn 
Elsmere more then ever on his wife. To him, made as/ it 
seemed for love and for enjoyment, grief was a novel hid 
difficult burden. He felt with passionate gratitude that|his 
wife helped him to bear it so that he came out from it liot 
lessened but ennobled, that she preserved him from manj a 
lapse of nervous weariness and irritation into which his tmi- 
perament might easily have been betrayed. 

And how his very dependence had endeared him to Cathp*- 
ine ! That vibrating, responsive quality in him, so easily mis¬ 
taken for mere weakness, which made her so necessary tO' 
him—there is nothing perhaps which wins more deeply upi^n 
a woman. For all the while it was balanced in a hundred wajs 
by the illimitable respect which his character and his doinij^ 
compelled from those about him. To be the strength, the iir 
most joy of a man who within the condition of his life seems 
to you a hero at every turn—there is no happiness more pene¬ 
trating for a wife than this. 

On this August afternoon the Elsmeres were expecting visi¬ 
tors. Catherine had sent the pony-carriage to the station to 
meet Rose and Langham, who was to escort her from Water¬ 
loo. For various reasons, all characteristic, it was Rose’s first 
visit to Catherine’s new liome. 

Now she had been for six weeks in London, and had been 
persuaded to come on to her sister, at the end of her stay. 
Catherine was looking forward to her coming with many 
tremors. The wild, ambitious creature had been not one atom 
appeased by Manchester and its opportunities. She had gone 
back to Whindale in April only to fall into more hopeless dis¬ 
content than ever. ‘‘ She can hardly be civil to anybody,” 
Agnes wrote to Catherine. “ The cry now is all ‘ London ’ or 
at least ‘ Berlin,’ and she can not imagine why papa should 
ever have wished to condemn us to such a prison.” 

Catherine grew pale with indignation as she read the words, 
and thought of her father’s short-lived joy in the old house 
and its few green fields, or of the confidence which had soothed 
his last moments, that it would be well there with his wife 
and children, far from the hubbub of the world. 

But Rose and her whims were not facts which could not be 
set aside. They would have to be grappled with, probably 
humored. As Catherine strolled out into the garden, listen¬ 
ing alternately for Robert and for the carriage, she told her¬ 
self that it would be a difficult Ausit. And the presence of 
Mr. Langham would certainly not diminish its difficulty. The 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


175 


mere thought of him set the wife’s young form stiffening. 
A cold breath seemed to blow from Edward Langliam, whicli 
chilled Catherine’s whole being. Why was Robert so fond 
of him ? « 

But the more Langham cut liimself off from the world, the 
more Robert clung to him in his wistful, affectionate way. 
The more difficult their intercourse became, the more deter¬ 
mined the younger man seemed to maintain it. Catherine im¬ 
agined that he often scourged himself in secret for the fact 
that the gratitude which had once flowed so readily had now 
become a matter of reflection and resolution. 

“ Why should we always expect to get pleasure from our 
friends ? ” he had said to her once with vehemence. “ It 
should be pleasure enough to love them.” And she knew very 
well of whom he was thinking. 

How late he was this afternoon. lie must have been a long 
round. She had news for him of great interest. The lodge- 
keeper from the Hall liad just looked in to tell the rector that 
the squire and his widowed sister were expected home in four 
days. 

But, interesting as the news was, Catherine’s looks as she 
pondered it were certainly not looks of pleased expectation. 
Neither of them, indeed, had much cause to rejoice in the 
squire’s advent. Since their arrival in the parish the splendid 
Jacobean Hall had been untenanted. The squire, who was 
abroad with his sister at the time of their coming, had sent 
a civil note to the new rector on his settlement in the parish, 
naming some common Oxford acquaintance, and desiring him 
to make what use of the famous Murewell Library he pleased. 
“ I hear of you as a friend to letters,” he wrote ; ‘‘ do my 
books a service by using them.” The words were graceful 
enough. Robert had answered them warmly. He had also 
availed himself largely of the permission they had conveyed. 
AVe shall see presently that the squire, though absent, had 
already made a deep impression on the young man’s imagi¬ 
nation. 

But unfortunately he came across the squire in two capa¬ 
cities. Mr. Wendover was not only the owner of Murewell, 
he was also the owner of the whole land of the parish, where 
however, by a curious accident of inheritance, dating some 
generations back, and implying some very remote connection 
between the Wendover and Elsmere families, he was not the 
patron of the living. Now the more Elsmere studied him 
under this aspect, the deeper became his dismay. The estate 
was entirely in the hands of an agent who had managed it for 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


ne 

some fifteen years, and of whose character the rector, before 
he had been two months in the parisli, had formed the very 
poorest opinion. Robert, entering upon his duties with the 
ardor of the iftodern reformer, armed not only with charity 
but with science, found himself confronted by the opposition 
of a man Avho combined the shrewdness of an attorney with 
the callousness of a drunkard. It seemed incredible that a 
great land-owner should ^^ommit his interests and the interests 
of hundreds of human beings to the hands of such a person. 

By and by, however, as the rector penetrated more deeply 
into the situation, he found his indignation transferring itself 
more and more from the man to the master. It became clear 
to him that in some respects Henslowe suited the squire admir¬ 
ably, It became also clear to him that the squire had taken 
pains for years to let it be known that he cared not one rap 
for any human being on his estate in any other capacity than 
as a rent-payer or wage-receiver. What! Live for thirty 
years in that great house, and never care whether your ten¬ 
ants and laborers lived like pigs or like men, whether the old 
people died of damp, or the children of diphtheida, which you 
might have prevented ! Robert’s brow grew dark over it. 

The click of an open gate. Catherine sliook off her dream¬ 
iness at once, and hurried along the path to meet her husband. 
In another moment Elsmere came in sight, swinging along, a 
holly stick in his hand, his face aglow with health and exercise 
and kindling at the sight of his wife. She hung on his arm, 
and, with his hand laid tenderly on hers, he asked her how she 
fared. She answered briefl}^ but with a little flush, her eyes 
raised to his. She was within a few weeks of motherhood. 

Then they strolled along talking. lie gave her an account 
of his afternoon, which, to judge from the worried expression 
which presently effaced the joy of their meeting, had been 
spent in some unsuccessful effort or other. They paused after 
a while, and stood looking over the plain before them to a spot 
beyond the nearer belt of woodland, where from a little hollow 
about three miles off there rose a cloud of bluish smoke. 

“ He will do nothing ! ’’ cried Catherine, incredulous. 

“Nothing ! It is the policy of the estate, apparently, to 
let the old and bad cottages fall to pieces. He sneers at one 
for supposing any land-owner has money for ‘ philanthropy’’ 
just now. If the people don’t like the houses they can go. 
I told him I should appeal to the squire as soon as he came 
home.” 

“ What did he say ? ” 

“He smiled, as much as to say: ‘ Do as you like, and be a 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


177 


fool for your pains.’ How the squire can let that man tyran¬ 
nize over tlie estate as he does, I can not conceive. Oh, Cath¬ 
erine, I arh full of qualms about the squire ! ” 

“ So am I,” slie said, with a little darkening of her clear 
look. ‘‘ Old Benham has just been in to say they are expected 
on Thursda}^” 

Robert started. ‘‘ Are these our last days of peace ? ” he 
said wistfully—“ the last days of our honeymoon, Catherine ? ” 

She smiled at him with a little quiver of j)assionate feeling- 
under the smile. 

“ Can an^^thing touch that ? ” she said, under her breath. 

“ Do you know,” he said presently, his voice dropping, 
“ that it is only a month to our wedding-day ? Oh, my 
wife, have I kept my promise—is the new life as rich as 
the old?” 

She made no answer, except the dumb, sweet answer that 
love writes on eyes and lips. Then a tremor passed over her. 

“ Are we too happy ? Can it be well—be right ? ” 

“ Oh, let us take it like children ! ” he cried, with a shiver, 
almost petulantly. “There will be dark hours enough. It is 
so good to be happy.” 

She leaned her cheek fondly against his shoulder. To her 
life alway meant self-restraint, self-repression, self-deadening, 
if need be. The Puritan distrust of personal joy as something 
dangerous and ensnaring was deep ingrained in her. It had 
no natural hold on him. 

They stood a moment hand in hand fronting the corn-field 
and the sun-filled -west, while the afternoon breeze blew back 
the man’s curly reddish hair, long since restored to all its 
natural abundance. 

Presently Robert broke into a broad smile. 

“ What do you suppose Langham has been entertaining Rose 
with on the way, Catherine ? I wouldn’t miss her remarks 
to-night on the escort we provided her for a good deal.” 

Catherine said nothing, but her delicate eyebrows went up 
a little. Robert stooped and lightly kissed her. 

“You never performed a greater act of virtue even in your 
life, Mrs. Elsmere, than when you wrote Langham that nice 
letter of invitation.” 

And then the young rector sighed, as many a boyish mem¬ 
ory came crowding upon him. 

A sound of wheels ! Robert’s long legs took him to the 
gate in a twinkling, and he flung it open just as Rose drove 
up in fine style, a thin, dark man beside her. 

Rose lent her bright cheek to Catherine’s kiss, and the two 


178 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


sisters walked up to the door together, while Robert and 
Langham loitered after them talking. 

“ Oh, Catherine ! ” said Rose, under her breath, as they got 
into the drawing-room, with a little theatrical gesture, “ wliy 
on earth did you inflict that man and me on each other for 
two mortal hours ? ” 

‘‘ Sli-sh ! ” said Catherine’s lips, while her face gleamed 
with laughter. 

Rose sunk flushed upon a chair, her eyes glancing up with 
a little furtive anger in them as the two gentlemen entered 
the room. 

“ You found each other easily at Waterloo ? ” asked Robert. 

‘‘ Mr. Langham would never have found said Rose 

dryly ; ‘‘but I pounced on him at last—just, I believe, as he 
was beginning to cherish the hope of an empty carriage and 
the solitary enjoyment of his ‘ Saturday Review.’ ” 

Langham smiled nervously. “ Miss Leybi:rn is too hard on 
a blind man,” he said, holding up his e5mglass apologetically; 
“ it was my eyes, not my will, that were at fault.” 

Rose’s lips curled a little. “ And Robert,” she cried, bend¬ 
ing forward as though something had just occurred to her, 
“ do tell me—I vowed I would ask— is Mr. Langham a Lib¬ 
eral or a Conservative ? He doesn’t know ! ” 

Robert laughed, so did Langham. 

“Your sister,” he said, flushing, “will have one so very 
precise in all one says.” 

He turned his handsome olive face toward her, an un¬ 
wonted spark of animation lighting up his black eyes. It 
was evident that he felt himself persecuted, but it was not so 
evident whether he enjoyed the process or disliked it. 

“ Oh, dear, no ! ” said Rose nonchalantly. “ Only I have 
just come from a house where everybody either loathes Mr. 
Gladstone or would die for him to-morrow. There was a 
girl of seven and a boy of nine who were always discussing 
‘ Coercion ’ in the corners of the school-room. So, of course, 
I have grown political too, and began to catechize Mr. Lang¬ 
ham at once, and when he said ‘ he didn’t know ’ I felt I 
should like to set those children at him ! They would soon 
put some principles into him ! ” 

“ It is not generall}^ lack of principle. Miss Rose,” said her 
brother-in-law, “ that turns a man a doubter in politics, but 
too much ! ” 

And while he spoke, his eyes resting on Langham, his smile 
broadened as he recalled all those instances in their Oxford 
past, when he had taken an humble share in one of the hercu- 


llOBEliT ELISMEUE. 


179 


lean efforts on the part of Langliam’s friends, which were 
always necessaiy whenever it was a question of screwing a 
vote out of him on any debated university question. 

“ How dull it must be to have too much principle ! ” cried 
Rose. “ Like a mill choked with corn. No bread because 
the machine can’t work ! ” 

“ Defend me from ny^ friends ! ” cried Langham, roused. 
“ Elsmere, when did I give you a right to caricature me in 
this way ? If I were interested,” he added, subsiding into his 
usual hesitating ineffectiveness, “I suppose I should know my 
own mind.” 

And then seizing the muffins, he stood presenting them to 
Rose as though in deprecation of any further personalities. 
Inside him there was a hot protest against an unreasonable 
young beauty whom he had done his miserable best to enter¬ 
tain for two long hours, and who in return had made him feel 
himself more of a fool than he had done for years. Since 
when had young women put on all these airs ? In his young 
days they knew their place. 

Catherine meanwhile sat Avatching her sister. The child 
was more beautiful than ever, but in other outer respects the 
Rose of Long Whindale had undergone much transformation. 
The puffed sleeves, the jesthetic skirts, the naive adornment 
of bead, and shell, the formless hat, which it pleased her to 
imagine ‘‘ after Gainsborough,” had all disappeared. She was 
clad in some soft, farvn-colored garment, cut very much in 
the fashion ; her hair Avas closely rolled and twisted about 
her lightly balanced head ; everything about her was neat 
and fresh and tight-fitting. A year ago she had been a 
damsel from the “ Early Paradise ”; now, so far as an Eng¬ 
lish girl can achieve it, she might have been a model for 
Tissot. In this phase, as in the other, there Avas a touch of 
extravagance. The girl was developing fast, but had clearly 
not yet developed. The restlessness, the self-consciousness of 
Long Whindale were still there ; but thpy spoke to the 
spectator in different Avays. 

But in her anxious study of her sister, Catherine did not 
forget her place of hostess. “ Did our man bring you 
thi’ough the park, Mr. Langham ? ” she asked him, timidly. 

“ Yes. What an exquisite old house ! ” he said, turning to 
her, and feeling through all his critical sense the difference 
between the gentle, matronly dignity of the one sister and 
the young self-assertion of the other. 

Ah,” said Robert, “ I kept that as a surprise. Did you 
ever see a more perfect place ? ” 


180 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


« What date?” 

“ Early Tudor—as to tlie oldest part. It was built by a 
relation of Bishop Fisher’s ; then largely rebuilt under Janies 
I. Elizabeth stayed there twice. There is a trace of a visit 
of Sidney’s. AValler was there, and left a copy of verses in 
the library. Evelyn laid out a great deal of the garden.' 
Lord Clarendon wrote part of his History in the garden, et 
cetera, et cetera. The place is steeped in associations, and 
as beautiful as a dream, to begin with.” 

“ And the owner of all this is the author of ‘ The Idols of 
the Market-place ? ’ ” 

Robert nodded. 

“ Did you ever meet him at Oxford ? I believe he was 
there once or twice during my time, but I never saw him.” 

“Yes,” said Langham, thinking. “I met him at dinner at 
the vice chancellor’s, now I remember. A bizarre and formid¬ 
able person—very difficult to talk to,” he added, reflectivelj". 

Then as he looked up he caught a sarcastic twitch of Rose 
Leyburn’s lips and understood it in a moment. Incontinently 
he forgot the squire and fell to asking himself Avhat had 
possessed him on that luckless journey down. He had never 
seemed to himself more perverse, more unmanageable ; and 
for once his philosophj^ did not enable him to swallow the 
certainty that this slim, flashing creature must have thought 
him a morbid idiot with as much saiig-froid as usual. 

Robert interrupted his reflections by some Oxford question, 
and presently Catherine carried off Rose to her room. On 
their way they passed a door, beside which Catherine paused 
hesitating, and then with a bright flush on the face, which 
had such maternal calm in it already, she threw her arm round 
Rose and drew her in. It was a white, empty room, smelling 
of the roses outside, and waiting in the evening stillness for 
the life that was to be. Rose looked at it all—at the piles of 
tiny garments, the cradle, the pictures from Retsch’s “ Song 
of the Bell,” which had been the companions of their own 
childhood, on the walls—and something stirred in the girl’s 
breast. 

“Catherine, I believe you have everthing you want, or you 
soon will have ! ” she cried, almost with a kind of bitterness, 
laying her hands on her sister’s shoulders. 

“ Everything but worthiness ! ” said Catherine, softly, a 
mist rising in her calm gray eyes. “ And you, Roschen,” she 
added, Avistfully, “ have you been getting a little more what 
you want?” 

“What’s the good of asking?” said the girl, with a little 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


181 


shrug of impatience. “ As if creatures like me ever got 
what they want ! London has been good fun, certainly—if 
one could get enough of it. Catherine, how long is that 
marvelous person going to stay?” and she pointed in the 
direction of Langham’s room. 

‘‘A week,” said Catherine, smiling at the girl’s disdainful 
'tone. “ I was afraid you didn’t take to him.’’ 

“ I never saw such a being before,” declared Rose—‘‘ never ! 
I thought I should never get a plain answer from him about 
anything. He wasn’t even quite certain it was a fine day ! 
I wonder if you set fire to him whether he would be sure it 
.'hurt ! A week, you say ! Heigh ho ! what an age ! ” 

‘‘ Be kind to him,” said Catherine, discreetly veiling her 
own feelings, and caressing the curly golden head as they 
moved toward the door. “ He’s a poor, lone don, and he was 
so good to Robert ! ” 

“ Excellent reason for you, Mrs. Elsmere,” said Rose, pout¬ 
ing ; “ but—” 

Her further remarks were cut short by the sound of the 
front-door bell. 

“ Oh, I had forgotten Mr. Newcome ! ” cried Catherine, 
starting. Come down soon. Rose, and help us, though.” 

“ Who is he ? ” inquired Rose sharply. 

‘‘ A High Church clergyman near here, whom Robert asked 
to tea this afternoon,” said Catherine, escaping. 

Rose took her hat off very leisurely. The prospect down¬ 
stairs did not seem to justify dispatch. She lingered and 
thought of “ Lohengrin ” and Albani, of the crowd of artistic 
friends that had escorted her to Waterloo, of the way in 
which she had been applauded the night before, of the joys of 
])laying Brahms with a long-haired pupil of Rubinstein’s, who 
had dropped on one knee and kissed her hand at the end of it, 
etc. During the last six weeks the color of “ this threadbare 
world ” had been freshening before her in marvelous fashion. 
And now, as she stood looking out, the quiet fields opposite, 
the sight of a cow pushing its head through the hedge, the 
infinite sunset sky, the quiet of the house, filled her with a 
sudden depression. How dull it all seemed—how wanting in 
the glow of life ! 

CHAPTER XII. 

Meanwhile downstairs a curious little scene was passing, 
watched by Langham, Avho, in his usual anti-social way, had 
retreated into a corner of his own as soon as another visitor 
appeared. Beside Catherine sat a Ritualist clergyman in cas- 


182 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


sock and long cloak—a saint clearly, though perhaps, to judge 
from the slight restlessness of movement that seemed to quiver 
through him perpetually, an irritable one. But he had the 
saint’s wasted, unearthly look, the ascetic brow high and nar¬ 
row, the veins showing through the skin, and a personality as 
magnetic as it was strong. 

Catherine listened to the new-comer, and gave him his tea, 
with an aloofness of manner which was not lost on Langham. 
‘‘ She is the Thirty-nine Articles in the flesh ! ” he said to him¬ 
self. “ For her there must neither be too much nor too little. 
How can Elsmere stand it ?” 

Elsmere apparently was not perfectly happy. He sat 
balancing his long person over the arm of a chair listening to 
the recital of some of the High Churchman’s parish troubles 
with a slight, half-embarrassed smile. The vicar of Mottring- 
ham was always in trouble. The narrative he was pouring 
out took shape in Langham’s sarcastic sense as a sort of 
classical epic, with the High Churchman as a new champion 
of Christendom, harassed on all sides by pagan parishioners, 
crass church-wardens, and treacherous bishops. Catherine’s 
fine face grew more and more set, nay disdainful. Mr. New- 
come was quite blind to it. Women never entered into his 
calculations except as sisters or as penitents. At a certain 
diocesan conference he had discovered a sympathetic fiber in 
the young rector of Murewell, which had been to the imperi¬ 
ous persecuted zealot like water to the thirsty. He had come 
to-day, drawn b}'' the same quality in Elsmere as had origi¬ 
nally attracted Langham to the St. Anselm’s undergraduate, 
and he sat pouring himself out with as much freedom as if all 
his companions had been as ready as he was to die for an alb, 
or to spend half of their days in piously circumventing a 
bishop. 

But presently the conversation had slid, no one knew how, 
from Mottringham and its intrigues to London and its teem¬ 
ing east. Robert was leading, his eye now on the apostolic- 
looking priest, now on his wife. Mr. Newcome resisted, but 
Robert had his wa}^ Then it came out that behind these battles 
of kites and crows at Mottringham, there lay an heroic period, 
when the pale ascetic had wrestled ten years with London pov¬ 
erty, leaving health and youth and nerves behind him in the 
melee. Rofcrt di-agged it out at last, that struggle, into open 
view, but with difficulty. The Ritualist may glory in the dis¬ 
comfiture of an Erastian bishop—what Christian dare to parade 
ten years of love to God and man ? And presently round Els- 
mere’s lip there dawned a little smile of triumph. Catherine had 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


183 


shaken off her cold silence, her Puritan aloofness, was bend¬ 
ing forward eagerly—listening. Stroke by stroke as the 
words were beguiled from him, all that was futile and quarrel¬ 
some in the sharp-featured priest sank out of sight ; the face 
glowed with inward light; the stature of the man seemed to 
rise ; the angel in him unsheathed its wings. Suddenly a 
story of the slums that Mr. Newcome was telling—a story of 
the purest Christian heroism told in the simplest way—came 
to an end, and Catherine leaned toward him with a long, 
quivering breath. 

“ Oh, thank you, thank you ! That must have been a joy, 
a privilege ! ” 

Mr. Newcome turned and looked at her with surprise. 

“Yes, it was a privilege,” he said slowly—the story had 
been an account of the rescue of a young country lad from a 
London den of thieves and profligates—“ you are right; it 
was just that.” 

And then some sensitive inner fiber of the man was set 
vibrating, and he would talk no more of himself or his past, 
do what the}^ would. 

So Robert had hastily to provide another subject, and he 
fell upon that of the squire. 

Mr. Newcome’s eyes flashed. 

“ He is coming back ? I am sorry for you, Elsmere. ‘Woe 
is me that I am constrained to dwell with Mesech, and to have 
my habitation among the tents of Kedar ! ’ ” 

And he fell back in his chair, his lips tightening, his thin 
long hand lying along the arm of it, answering to that general 
impression of combat, of the spiritual athlete, that Imng 
about him. 

“I don’t know,” said Robert brightly, as he leaned against 
the mantel-piece, looking curiously at his visitor. “ The squire 
is a man of strong character, of vast learning. His library is 
one of the finest in England, and it is at my service. I am 
not concerned with his opinions.” 

“Ah, I see,” said Newcome, in his dryest voice, but sadly. 
“ You are one of the people who believe in wliat you call toler¬ 
ance—I remember.” 

“ Yes, that is an impeachment to which I plead guilty,” 
said Robert, perhaps with equal dryness ; “ and you—have 
your worries driven you to throw tolerance overboard ? ” 

Newcome bent forward quickly. Strange glow and inten¬ 
sity of the fanatical eyes—strange beauty of the Avasted, per¬ 
secuting lips ! 

“ lYlerance ! ” he said, with irritable \xhemence—“toler- 


184 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


aiice ! Simply anotber name for betrayal, cowardice, deser¬ 
tion—nothing else. God, Heaven, Salvation on the one side, 
the devil and hell on the other—and one miserable life, one 
wretched, sin-stained will, to win the battle with ; and in such 
a state you ”—he dropped his voice, throAving out every Avord 
Avith a scornful sibilant emphasis— T you Avould have us be¬ 
have as though our friends Avere our enemies and our enemies 
our friends, as though eternal misery Avere a bagatelle and our 
faith a mere alternative. I stand for Christy and his foes are 
mine.” 

“ Hy Avhich I suppose you mean,” said Robert quietly, 
“that you AA^ould shut your door on the writer of “ The Idols 
of the Market-place ? ” 

“ CertainlA^” 

And the priest rose, his Avdiole attention concentrated on Rob¬ 
ert, as though some deeper-lying motive Avere suddenly brought 
into play than any suggested by the conversation itself. 

“ Certainly, judge not —so long as a man has not judged 
liimself—only till then. As to an open enemy, the Christian’s 
path is clear. We are but soldiers under orders. What busi¬ 
ness have Ave to be truce-making on our oavu account ? The 
war is not ours, but God’s ! ” 

Robert’s eyes had kindled. He Avas about to indulge him¬ 
self in such a quick passage of arms as all such natures as his 
delight in, Avhen his look traveled past the gaunt figure of the 
Ritualist vicar to his Avife. A sudden pang smote, silenced 
him. She Avas sitting Avith her face raised to Newcome ; and 
her beautiful gray eyes were full of a secret passion of sym¬ 
pathy. It Avas like the sudden re-emergence of something 
repressed, the satisfaction of something hungry. Robert 
moved closer to her, and the color flushed OA^er all his young 
boyish face. 

“ To me,” he said, in a Ioav A^oice, his eyes fixed rather on 
her than on NeAvcome, “a clergyman has enough to do Avitli 
those foes of Christ he can not choose but recognize. There 
is no making truce Avith vice or cruelty. Why should Ave 
complicate our task and spend in needless struggle the ener¬ 
gies Ave might give to love and to our brother?” 

His Avife turned to him. There Avas trouble in her look, 
then a SAvift, lovely daAvn of something indescribable. NeAV- 
come moved aAvay Avith a gesture that Avas half bitterness, half 
Aveariness. 

“ Wait, my friend,” he said sloAvly, “till you have Avatched 
that man’s books eating the very heart out of a poor creature 
as I have. AVhen jon Itave once seen Christ robbed of a soul 


liOBEllT ELSMERE. 


185 


that might have been his, by the infidel of genius, you will 
loathe all this Laodicean cant of tolerance as I do ! ” 

There was an awkward pause. Langham, with his eyeglass 
on, was carefully examining the make of a carved paper-knife 
lying near him. The strained, preoccupied mind of the High 
Churchman had never taken the smallest account of his pres¬ 
ence, of which Robert had been keenly, not to say humorously, 
conscious throughout. 

But after a minute or so the tutor got up, strolled forward, 
and addressed Robert on some Oxford topic of common inter¬ 
est. Newcome, in a kind of dream which seemed to have sud¬ 
denly descended on him, stood near them, his priestly cloak 
falling in long folds about him, his ascetic face grave and rapt. 
Oraduall}^, however, the talk of the two men dissipated the 
mystical cloud about him. He began to listen, to catch the 
savor of Langham’s modes of speech, and of his languid, indif¬ 
ferent personality. 

“ I must go,” he said abruptly, after a minute or two, 
breaking in upon the friends’ conversation. “ I shall hardly 
get home before dark.” 

He took a cold, punctilious leave of Catherine, and a still 
colder and slighter leave of Langham. Elsmere accompanied 
him to the gate. 

On the way the older man suddenly caught him by the arm. 
“Elsmere, let me—I am the elder by so many years—let 
me speak to you. My heart goes out to you ! ” 

And the eagle face softened ; the harsh, commanding pres¬ 
ence became enveloping, magnetic. Robert paused and looked 
lown upon him, a quick light of foresight in his eye. He felt 
what was coming. 

And down it swept upon him, a hurricane of words hot from 
ISTewcome’s inmost being, a protest winged by the gathered pas¬ 
sion of years against certain “ dangerous tendencies ” the elder 
priest discerned in the younger, against the worship of intellect 
and science as such which appeared in Elsmere’s talk, in Els- 
mere’s choice of friends. It was the eternal cry of the mystic 
of all ages. 

“ Scholarship ! learning ! ” Eyes and lips flashed into a ve¬ 
hement scorn. “ You allow them a value in themseh^es, apart 
from the Christian’s test. It is the modern canker, the mod¬ 
ern curse ! Thank God, my years in London burned it out of 
me ! Oh, my friend, what have-you and I to do with all these 
curious triflings, which lead men oftener to rebellion than to 
Avorshi]) ? Is this a time for wholesale trust, for a maudlin uni¬ 
versal sympathy ! Nay, rather a day of suspicion, a day of re- 


186 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


pression !—a time for trampling on the lusts of the mind no less 
than the lusts of the bod}^, a time when it is better to believe 
than to know, to pray than to understand ! ” 

Robert was silent a moment, and they stood together. New- 
come’s gaze of fiery appeal fixed upon him. 

“ We are differently made, you and I,” said the young rector 
at last, with difficulty. “ Where 3^011 see temptation I see op- 
portunit}''. I can not conceive of God as the Arch-plotter 
against his own creation ! ” 

Newcomb dropped his hold abruptly. 

“A groundless optimism,” he said, with harshness. “On 
the track of the soul from birth to death there are two sleuth- 
hounds—Sin and Satan. Mankind forever flies them, is for¬ 
ever vanquished and devoured. I see life alwaj^s as a thread¬ 
like path between abysses along which man creeps ”—and his 
gesture illustrated the words—“ with bleeding hands and feet 
toward one—narrow—solitary outlet. Woe to him if he turn 
to the right hand or the left—‘ I will repay, saith the Lord ! ’ ” 

Elsmere drew himself up suddenly ; the words seemed to him 
a blasphemy. Then something staj^ed the vehement answer on 
his lips. It was a sense of profound, intolerable pit}^ What a 
maimed life ! what an indomitable soul ! Husbandhood, father¬ 
hood, and all the sacred education that flows from human joy 
forever self-forbidden, and this grim creed for recompense ! 

He caught Newcome’s hand with a kind of filial eagerness. 

“ You are a perpetual lesson to me,” he said, most gentl}^ 
“ When the world is too much with me I think of 3^011 and am 
rebuked. God bless 3^11 ! But I know myself. If I could see 
life and God as 3^ou see them for one hour, I should cease to be 
a Christian in the next ! ” 

A flush of something like somber resentment passed _over 
Newconie’s face. There is a tyrannical element in all fanati¬ 
cism, an element which makes opposition a torment. He 
turned abruptl3" away, and Robert was left alone. 

It was a still, clear evening, rich in the languid softness and 
balm Avhich mark the first approaches of autumn. Elsmere 
walked back to the house, his head uplifted to the sky which 
lay beyond the corn-field, his whole being wrought into a pas¬ 
sionate protest—a passionate invocation of all things beautiful 
and strong and free, a clinging to life and nature as to some¬ 
thing wronged and outraged. 

Suddenly his wife stood beside him. She had come down 
to warn him that it was late and that Ijangham had gone to 
dress ; but she stood lingering b3" his side after her message 
was given, and he made no movement to go in. He turned to 


ROBERT ELSMERE, 


187 


her, the exaltation gradually dying out of his face, and at last 
he stooped and kissed her with a kind of timidity unlike him. 
She clasped both hands on his arm and stood pressing toward 
him as though to make amends—for she knew not what. 
Something—some sharp momentary sense of difference, of 
antagonism, had hurt that inmost fiber which is the conscience 
of true passion. She did the most generous, the most ample 
penance for it as she stood there talking to him of half indif¬ 
ferent things, but with a magic, a significance of eye and 
voice which seemed to take all the severity from her "beauty 
and make her womanhood itself. 

At that evening meal Rose appeared in pale blue, and it 
seemed to Langham, fresh from the absolute seclusion of 
college rooms in vacation, that everything looked flat and 
stale beside her, beside the flash of her white arms, the gleam 
of her hair, the confident grace of every movement. He 
thought her much too self-conscious and self-satisfied ; and 
she certainl}^ did not make herself agreeable to him ; but for 
all that he could hardly take his eyes off her ; and it occurred 
to him once or twice to envy Robert the easy, childish friend¬ 
liness she showed to him, and to him alone of the party. The 
lack of real sympathy between her and Catherine was evident 
to the stranger at once—what, indeed, could the two have in 
common ? He saw that Catherine was constantly on the point 
of blaming, and Rose constantly on the point of rebelling. 
He caught the wrinkling of Catherine’s brow as Rose pre¬ 
sently, in emulation apparently of some acquaintances she 
had been making in London, let slip the names of some of her 
male friends without the ‘‘ Mr.,” or launched into some bolder 
affectation than usual of a comprehensive knowledge of Lon¬ 
don society. The girl, in spite of all her beauty, and her 
fashion, and the little studied details of her dress, was in 
reality so crude, so much of a child under it all, that it made 
her audacities and assumptions the more absurd, and he could 
see that Robert was vastly assumed by them. 

But Langham was not merely amused by her. She was 
too beautiful and too full of character. 

It astonished him to find himself afterward edging over to 
the corner where she sat with the rectory cat on her knee—an 
inferior animal, but the best substitute for Chattie available. 
So it was, however ; and once in her neighborhood he made 
another serious effort to get her to talk to him. The Elsmeres 
had never seen him so conversational. He dropped his para¬ 
doxical melancholy ; he roared as gently as any sucking dove ; 
and Robert, catching from the pessimist of St. Anselm’s, as 


188 


llOBEltT ELS3IE11E. 


the evening went on, some hesitating commonplace's worthy 
of a baslifiil undergraduate on the subject of the boats and 
Commemoration, had to beat a hasty retreat, so greatly did 
the situation tickle his sense of humor. 

But the tutor made his various ventures under a discourag¬ 
ing sense of failure. What a capricious, ambiguous creature 
it was, how fearless, how disagreeabl}^ alive to all his own 
damaging peculiarities ! Never had he been so })iqued for 
years, and as he floundered about trying to And some common 
ground Avhere he and slie might be at ease, he was conscious 
throughout of her mocking, indifferent eyes, Avhich seemed to 
be saying to him all the time : “You are not interesting—no, 
not a bit ! You are tiresome, and I see through a^ou, but I 
must talk to you, 1 suppose, de mieuxB 

Long before the little party sepai-ated for the night Lang- 
ham had given it up, and had betaken himself to Catherine, 
reminding himself Avith some sharj)ness that he had come 
doAvn to study his friend’s life, rather than the humors of a 
provoking girl. IIoav still the summer night Avas round the 
isolated rectoiy ; hoAV fresh and spotless Avere all the appoint¬ 
ments of the house ; Avhat a Quaker neatness and refinement 
everyAAdiere ! lie drank in the scent of air and floAvers Avith 
Avhich the rooms Avere filled : for the first time his fastidious 
sense Avas pleasantly conscious of Catherine’s grave beauty ; 
and even the m3^stic ceremonies of family prayer had a cer¬ 
tain charm for him, pagan as he Avas. IIoav much dignity 
and persuasiveness it has still, he thought to himself, this 
commonplace country life of ours, on its best sides ! 

Half-past ten arrived. Rose just let him touch her hand ; 
Catherine gave him a quiet good-night, Avitli A'arious hospi¬ 
table wishes for his nocturnal comfort, and the ladies Avith- 
dreAV. He saAV Robert open the door for his Avife, and catch 
her thin Avhite fingers as she passed him with all the secrecy 
and passion of a lover. 

Then they plunged into the study, he and Robert, and 
smoked their fill. The study Avas an astonishing medley. 
Books, natural history specimens, a half-Avritten sermon, 
fishing-rods, cricket-bats, a huge medicine cupboard—all the 
main elements of Elsmere’s new existence AA^ere represented 
there. In the draAving-room Avith his Avife and his sister-in- 
laAV he had been as much of a bo}’^ as ever ; here clearly he 
Avas a man, A'cry much in earnest. AVhat about ? What did 
it all come to ? Can the English country clergyman do much 
Avith his life and his energies ? Langham approached the sub¬ 
ject with liis usual scej)ticism. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 189 

Robert for a while, however, did not help him to solve it. 
He fell at once to talking about the squire, as though it 
cleared his mind to talk out his difficulties even to so ineffec¬ 
tive a counselor as Langham. Langham, indeed, was but 
faintly interested in the squire’s crimes as a landlord, but there 
was a certain interest to be got out of the struggle in Els- 
mcre’s mind between the attractiveness of the squire, as one 
of the most difficult and original personalities of English let¬ 
ters, and that moral condemnation of him as a man of posses¬ 
sions and ordinary human responsibilities with which the 
young reforming rector was clearly penetrated. So that, as 
long as he could smoke under it, he was content to let his com¬ 
panion describe to him Mr. Wendover’s connection with the 
property, his accession to it in middle life after a long resi¬ 
dence in Germany, his ineffectual attempts to play English 
country gentleman, and his subseque-nt complete withdrawal 
from the life about him. 

“ You have no idea what a queer sort of existence he lives 
in that huge place,” said Robert with energy. “ He is not un¬ 
popular exactly witli the poor down here. When the}^ want 
to belabor anybody they lay on at the agent, Henslowe. On 
the whole, I have come to the conclusion the poor like a mys¬ 
tery. They never see him ; Avhen he is here the park is shut 
up ; the common report is that he walks at night; and he lives 
alone in that enormous house with his books. The country 
folk have all quarreled with him, or nearly. It pleases him to 
get a few of the humbler people about, clergy, professional 
men, and so on, to dine with him sometimes. And he often 
fills the Hall, I am told, with London people for a day or two. 
But otherwise he knows no one, and nobody knows him.” 

“ But you say he has a widowed sister ? How does she 
relish the kind of life ? ” 

‘‘ Oh, by all accounts,” said the rector, with a shrug, ‘‘ she 
is as little like other people as himself. A queer, elfish little 
creature, they say, as fond of solitude down here as the squire, 
and full of hobbies. In her youth she was about the court. 
Then she married a canon of Warham, one of the popular 
preachers, I believe, of the day. There is a bright little cousin 
of hers, a certain Lady Helen Varley, who lives near here, and 
tells me stories of her. She must be the most whimsical little 
aristocrat imaginable. She liked her husband apparently, 
but she never got over leaving London and the fashionable 
world, and is as hungry now, after her long fast, for titles and 
big-wigs, as though she were the purest parvenu. The squire 
of course makes mock of her, and she has no influence with 


190 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


him. However, there is something.iiaive in the stories they 
tell of her. I feel as if I might get on with her. But the 
squire ! ” 

And the rector, having laid down his pipe, took to studying 
his boots with a certain dolefulness. 

Langham, however, who always treated the subjects of con¬ 
versation presented to him as an epicure treats foods, felt at 
this point that he had had enough of the Wendovers, and 
started something else. 

“ So you physic bodies as well as minds ? ” he said, pointing 
to the medicine cupboard. 

“ I should think so ! ” cried Robert, brightening at once. 
‘‘ Last winter I causticked all the diphtheretic threats in the 
place with my own hand. Our parish doctor is an infirm old 
noodle, and I just had to do it. And if the state of part of the 
parish remains what it is, it’s a pleasure I may promise myself 
most years. But it shan’t remain what it is.” 

And the rector reached out his hand again for his pipe, and 
gave one or two energetic puffs to it as he surveyed his friend 
stretched before him in the depths of an arm-chair. 

“ I will make myself a public nuisance, but the people shall 
have their drains ! ” 

“ It seems to me,” said Langhorn, musing, ‘‘ that in my 
youth people talked about Ruskin ; now they talk about 
drains.” 

“ And quite right too. Dirt and drains, Catherine says I 
have gone mad upon them. It’s all very well, but they are 
the foundations of a sound religion.” 

“Dirt, drains, and Darwin,” said Langham meditatively, 
taking up Darwin’s “ Earthworms,” which lay on the study- 
table beside him, side by side with a volume of Grant Allen’s 
“ sketches.” “ I didn’t know you cared for this sort of thing ! ” 

Robert did not answer for a moment, and a faint flush stole 
into his face. 

“ Imagine, Langham ! ” he said, presently, “ I had never 
read even ‘The Origin of Species’ before I came here. We 
used to take the thing half for granted, I remember, at Ox¬ 
ford, in a more or less modified sense. But to drive the mind 
through all the details of the evidence, to force one’s-self to 
understand the whole hypothesis and the grounds for it, is a 
very different matter. It is a revelation.” 

“Yes,” said Langham ; and could not forbear adding, “but 
it is a revelation, my friend, that has not always been lield to 
square with other revelations.” 

In general these two kept carefully off the religious ground. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


191 


The man wlio is religions by nature tends to keep his treasure 
hid from the man who is critical by nature, and Langham was 
much more interested in other things. But still it had always 
been understood that each was free to say what he would. 

“ There was a natural panic,” said Robert, throwing back 
his head at the challenge. “Men shrunk and always will 
shrink, say what you will, from what seems to touch things 
dearer to them than life. But the panic is passing. The 
smoke is clearing away, and we see that the battle-field is 
falling into new lines. But the old truth remains the same. 
Where and how and when you will, but somewhen and some¬ 
how, God created the heavens and the earth ! ” 

Langham said nothing. It had seemed to him for long that 
the clergy were becoming dangerously ready to throw the Old 
Testament overboard, and all that it appeared to him to imply 
was that men’s logical sense is easily benumbed where their 
hearts are concerned. 

“ Not that every one need be troubled with the new facts,” 
resumed Robert, after a while, going back to his pipe. “ Why 
should they? We are not saved by Darwinism. I should 
never press them on my wife, for instance, with all her clear¬ 
ness and courage of mind.” 

His voice altered as he mentioned his wife—grew ex;traor- 
dinarily soft, even reverential. 

“ It would distress her ? ” said Langham interrogatively, 
inwardly conscious of pursuing investigations begun a year 
before. 

“ Yes, it would distress her. She holds the old ideas as she 
was taught them. It is all beautiful to her, what may seem 
doubtful or grotesque to others. And why should I or any 
one else trouble her ? I above all, who am not fit to tie her 
shoe-strings.” 

The young husband’s face seemed to gleam in the dim light 
which fell upon it. Langham involuntarily put up his hand 
in silence and touched his sleeve. Robert gave him a quiet, 
friendly look, and the two men instantly plunged into some 
quite trivial and commonplace subject. 

Langham entered his room that night with a renewed sense 
of pleasure in the country quiet, the peaceful, fiower-scented 
house. Catherine, who was an admirable housewife, had put 
out her best guest-sheets for his benefit, and the tutor, accus¬ 
tomed for long years to the second-best of college service, 
looked at their shining surfaces and frilled edges, at the 
freshly matted floor, at the flowers on the dressing-table, at 
the spotlessness of everything in the room, with a distinct 



192 


ROBERT KLSMERE. 


sense that matrimony liad its advantages. He had come down 
to visit the Elsmeres, sustained by a considerable sense of vir¬ 
tue. He still loved Elsmere, and cared to see him. It was a 
much colder love, no doubt, than that which he had given to 
the undergraduate. But the man altogether was a colder 
creature, who for years had been drawing in tentacle after 
tentacle, and becoming more and more content to live without 
his kind. Robert’s parsonage, however, and Robert’s wife, 
had no attractions for him ; and it was with an effort that he 
had made up his mind to accept the invitation which Cath¬ 
erine had made an effort to write. 

And, after all, the experience promised to be pleasant. His 
fastidious love for the quieter, subtler sorts of beauty was 
touched by the Elsmere surroundings. And whatever Miss 
Leyburn might be, she was not commonplace. The demon of 
convention had no large part in her ! Langham lay awake 
for a time analyzing his impressions of her with some gusto, 
and meditating, with a whimsical candor which seldom failed 
him, on the manner in which she had trampled on him, and 
the reasons why. 

He w^oke up, however, in a totally different frame of mind. 
He was pre-eminently a person of moods, dependent, proba¬ 
bly, as all moods are, on certain obscure physical variations. 
And his mental temperature had run down in the night. The 
house, the people who had been fresh and interesting to him 
twelve hours before, were now the burden he had more than 
half expected them to be. He lay and thought of the un¬ 
broken solitude of his college rooms, of Senancour’s flight 
from human kind, of the uselessness of all friendship, the ab¬ 
surdity of all effort, and could hardly persuade himself to get 
up and face a futile world, which had, moreover, the enormous 
disadvantage of being a new one. 

Convention, however, is master even of an Obermann. 
That prototype of all the disillusioned had to cut himself 
adrift from the society of the eagles on the Dent du Midi, to 
go and hang like any other ridiculous mortal on the Paris law 
courts. Langham, whether he liked it or no, had to face the 
parsonic breakfast and the parsonic day. 

He had just finished dressing when the sound of a girl’s 
voice drew him to the window, which was open. In the gar¬ 
den stood Rose, on the edge of the sunk fence dividing the 
rectory domain from the corn-field. She was stooping for¬ 
ward playing Avith Robert’s Dandie Dinmont. In one hand 
she held a mass of poppies, which showed a vivivl scarlet 
against her blue dress ; the other Avas stretched out seduc- 


liOBERT EL8MERE. 


19 : 


lively to the dog leaping round her. A crystal buckle flashed 
at her waist ; the sunshine caught the curls of auburn hair, 
the pink cheek, the white moving hand, the lace ruffles at her 
throat and wrist. The lithe, glittering figure stood thrown 
out against the heavy woods behind, the gold of the corn-^ 
field, the blues of the distance. All the ga3^ety and color 
which is as truly representative of autumn as the gray lan¬ 
guor of a September mist had passed into it. 

Langham stood and watched, hidden, as he thought, by the 
curtain, till a gust of wind shook the casement window beside 
him, and threatened to blow it in upon him. He put out his 
hand perforce to save it, and the slight noise caught Rose’s 
ear. She looked up ; her smile vanished. “ Go down, Dan- 
die,” she said severel}^, and walked quickly into the house 
with as much dignity as nineteen is capable of. 

Af breakfast the Elsmeres found their guest a difficulty. 
Rut they also, as we know, had expected it. He was languor 
itself ; none of their conversational efforts succeeded ; and 
Rose, stud^dng him out of the corners of her eyes, felt that 
it would be of no use even to torment so strange and impene¬ 
trable a being. Why on earth should people come and visit 
their^friends if they could not keep up even the ordinary 
decent pretenses of society ? 

Robert had to go off to some clerical business afterward, 
and Langham wandered out into the garden by himself. As 
he thought of his Greek texts and his untenanted Oxford 
rooms, he had the same sort of craving that an opium-eater 
has cut off from his drugs. How was he to get through ? 

Presently he walked back into the study, secured an armful 
of volumes, and carried them out. True to himself in the 
smallest things, he could never in his life be content with the 
companionship of one book. To cut off the possibilitv of 
clioice and change in anything whatever was repugnant to him. 

He sat himself down under the shade of a great chestnut 
near the house, and an hour glided pleasantly away. As it 
hapi)ened, however, he did not open one of the books he had 
brought with him. A thought had struck him as he sat down, 
and he went groping in his pockets in search of a yellow- 
covered brochure^ which, when found, proved to be a new play 
by Dumas, just about to be produced by a French company 
in London. Langham, whose passion for the French theater 
supplied him, as we know, with a great deal of life without 
the trouble of living, was going to see it, and always made a 
point of reading the piece beforehand. 

The play turned upon a typical French situation, treated in 


194 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 

a manner rather more French than usual. The reader 
shrugged his shoulders a good deal as he read on. “ Strange 
nation ! ” he muttered to himself after an act or two. “ How 
they do revel in mud ! ” 

# Presently, just as the fifth act was beginning to get hold 
of him with that force which, after all, only a French play¬ 
wright is master of, he looked up and saw the two sisters 
coming round the corner of the house from the great kitchen 
garden, which stretched its grass paths and tangled flower- 
masses down the further sloj^e of the hill. The transition 
was sharp from Dumas’s heated atmosphere of passion and 
crime to the quiet English rectory, its rural surroundings, 
and the figures of the two English women advancing 
toward him. 

Catherine was in a loose white dress, with a black lace 
scarf draped about her head and form. Her look hardly sug¬ 
gested youth, and there was certainly no touch of age in it. 
Ripeness, maturity, serenity—these were the chief ideas 
which seemed to rise in the mind at sight of her. 

‘‘ Are you amusing yourself, Mr. Langham ? ” she said, 
stopping beside him and retaining with slight imperceptible 
force Rose’s hand, which threatened to slip away. 

“ Very much. I have been skimming through a play, which 
I hope to see next week, by way of preparation.” 

Rose turned involuntarily. Not wishing to discuss “ Mari¬ 
anne ” with either Catherine or her sister, Langham had just 
closed the book and was returning it to his pocket. But she 
had caught sight of it. 

“ You are reading ‘ Marianne,’ ” she exclaimed, the slight¬ 
est possible touch of wonder in her tone. 

“Yes, it is ‘Marianne,’” said Langham, surprised in his 
turn. He had very old-fashioned notions about the limits of 
girl’s acquaintance with the world, knowing nothing, therefore, 
as may be supposed, about the modern young woman, and he 
was a trifle scandalized by Rose’s accent of knowledge. 

“I read it last week,” she said carelessly; “ and the Pier¬ 
sons”—turning to lier sister—“ have promised to take me to see 
it next winter if Desforets comes again, as every one expects.” 

“ Who wrote it ? ” asked Catherine, innocently. The theater 
not only gave her little pleasure, but wounded in her a hun¬ 
dred deep, unconquerable instincts. But she had long ago 
given up in despair the hope of protesting against Rose’s 
dramatic instincts with success. 

“ Dumas’’ said Langham dryly. He was distinctly a 
good deal astonished. 


IWBERT ELSMERE. 


195 


Rose looked at liim, and something brought a sudden flame 
into her cheek. 

“ It is one of the best of his,” she said defiantly. “ I have 
read a good many others. Mrs. Pierson lent me a volume. 
And when I was introduced to Madame Desforets last week, 
she agreed with me that ‘ Marianne ’ is nearly the best of all.” 

All this, of course, with the delicate nose well in air. 

“You were introduced to Madame Desforets ? ” cried Lang- 
ham, sur2)rised this time quite out of discretion. Catherine 
looked at him with anxiety. The reputation of the black-eyed 
little French actress, who had been for a year or two the idol 
of the theatrical public of Paris and London, had reached even 
to her, and the tone of Langham’s exclamation struck her 
painfully. 

“ I was,” said Rose proudly. “ Other people may think it 
a disgrace. I thought it an honor ! ” 

Langham could not help smiling, the girl’s naivete was so 
evident. It was clear that, if she had read “ Marianne,” she 
had never understood it, 

“ Rose,you don’t know ! ” exclaimed Catherine, turning to 
her sister with a sudden trouble in her eyes. “ I don’t think 
Mrs. Pierson ouglit to have done that without consulting 
mamma especially.” 

“ Why not ? ” cried Rose, venomously. Her face was burn¬ 
ing and her heart was full of something like hatred of Lang¬ 
ham, but she tried hard to be calm. 

“ I think,” she said with a desperate attempt at crushing 
dignity, “ that the way in which all sorts of stories are believed 
against a woman, just because she is an 2iQtvefi%\s disgraceful! 
Just because a woman is on the stage, everybody thinks they 
may throw stones at her. I know^ because—because she told 
me,"” cried the speaker, growing, however, half embarrassed as 
she spoke, “that she feels the things that are said of her 
deeply ! She has been ill, very ill, and one of her friends said 
to me. ‘ You know it isn’t her work or a cold, or anything 
else that’s made her ill—it’s calumny.’ And so it is.” 

The speaker flashed an angry glance at Langham. She was 
sitting on the arm of the cane chair into which Catherine had 
fallen, one hand grasping the back of the chair for support, 
one pointed foot beating the ground restlessly in front of her 
her small, full mouth pursed indignantly, the greenish-gray 
eyes flashing and brilliant. 

’ As for Langham, the cynic withim him was on the point of 
uncontrollable laughter. Mine. Desforets complaining of cal¬ 
umny to this little Westmoreland maiden! But his eyes invol- 


196 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


uiitarily met Catherine’s, and the expression of both fused into 
a common wonderment—amused on his side, anxious on hers. 
“ What a child, what an infant it is ! ” they seemed to confide 
to one another. Catherine laid her hand softly on Rose’s, and 
was about to say something soothing, which might secure her 
an opening for some sisterly advice later on, when there was a 
sound of calling from the gate. She looked up and saw Robert 
waving to her. Evidentl}^ he had just run up from the school 
to deliver a message. She hurried across the drive to him and 
afterward into the house, where he disappeared. 

Rose got up from her perch on the arm-chair and would 
have followed, but a moment of obstinacy or quixotic wrath, 
or both, detained her. 

“ At any rate, Mr. Langham,” she said, drawing herself up, 
and speaking with the most lofty accent, “ if you don’t know 
anytliing personallj^ about Madame Desforets, I think it would 
be much fairer to say nothing—and not to assume at once that 
all you hear is true ! ” 

Langham had rarely felt more awkward than he did then, 
as he sat leaning forward under the tree, this slim, indignant 
creature standing over him, and his consciousness about equally 
divided between a sense of her absurdity and a sense of her 
prettiness. 

“ You are an advocate worth having. Miss Leyburn,” he 
said at last, an enigmatical smile he could not restrain playing 
about his mouth. “ I could not argue with you ; I had better 
not try.” 

Rose looked at him, at his dark, regular face, at the black 
eyes which were much vivider than usual, perhaps because 
they could not help reflecting some of the irrepressible memo¬ 
ries of Mine. Desforets and her causes ceUhres which were 
coursing through the brain behind them, and with a momentary 
impression of rawness, defeat, and yet involuntary attrac¬ 
tion, which galled her intolerably, she turned away and 
left him. 

In the afternoon, Robert was still unavailable, to his own 
great chagrin, and Langham summoned up all his resignation 
and walked with the ladies. The general impression left upon 
his mind by the performance was, first, that the dust of an 
English August is intolerable, and, secondly, that women’s so¬ 
ciety ought only to be ventured on by the men who are made 
for it. The views of Catherine and Rose may be deduced 
from his with tolerable certainty. 

But in the late afternoon, wlien they thought they had done 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


197 


their duty by him, and he was again alone in the garden read¬ 
ing, he suddenly heard the sounds of music. 

What was playing, and in that way ? He got up and strolled 
past the drawing-room window to find out. 

Rose had got hold of an accompanist, the timid, dowdy 
daughter of a local solicitor, with some capacity for reading, 
ajid was now, in her lavish, impetuous fashion, rushing through 
a quantity of new music, the accumulations of her visit to 
London. She stood up beside the piano, her white brow hang¬ 
ing forward over her violin as she peered her way through 
the music, her whole soul absorbed in what she doing. Lang- 
ham passed unnoticed. 

What astonishing playing ! Why had no one warned him 
of the presence of such a gift in this dazzling, prickly, unripe 
creature ? He sat down against the wall of the house, as 
close as possible, but out of sight, and listened. All the 
romance of his spoiled and solitary life had come to him so far 
through music, and through such music as this ! For she was 
playing Wagner, Brahms, and Rubinstein, interpreting all 
those passionate voices of the subtlest moderns, through wiiicli 
the heart of our own day has expressed itself even more freely 
and exactly than through the voice of literature. Hans 
Sachs’s immortal song, echoes from the love duets in “ Tris¬ 
tan and Isolde,” fragments from a wild and alien dance- 
music, they rippled over him in a warm, intoxicating stream of 
sound, stirring association after association, and rousing from 
sleep a hundred by-gone moods of feeling. 

What magic and mastery in the girl’s touch ! What power 
of divination, and of rendering ! Ah ! she too was floating in 
passion and romance, but of a different sort altogether from 
the conscious reflected product of man’s nature. She was not 
thinking of the past, but of the future ; she was weaving her 
story that was to be into the flying notes, playing to the un¬ 
known of her Whindale dreams, the strong, ardent unknown— 
“ insufferable, if he pleases, to all the world besides, but to me 
heaven!” She had caught no breath yet of his coming, but 
her heart was ready for him. 

Suddenly, as she put down her violin, the French window 
opened, and Langham stood before her. She looked at him 
with a quick stiffening of the face which a minute before had 
been all quivering and relaxed, add his instant perception of it 
chilled the impulse which had brought him there. 

He said something banal about his enjoyment, something 
totally different from what he had meant to say. The moment 
presented itself, but he could not seize it or her. 


198 


liOBEBT EL8MERE. 


“ I had no notion you cared for music,” she said carelessly, 
as she shut the piano, and then she went away. 

Langham felt a strange, fierce pang of disappointment. 
What had he meant to do or say ? Idiot ! What common 
ground was there between him and any such exquisite youth ? 
What girl would ever see in him anything but the dull remains 
of what once had been a man ! 

CHAPTER XIII. 

The next day was Sunday. Langham, who was as depressed 
and homesick as ever, with a certain new spice of restlessness, 
not altogether intelligible to himself, thrown in, could only 
brace himself to the prospect by the determination to take the 
English rural Sunday as the subject of severe scientific inves¬ 
tigation. He would “ do it ” thoroughly. 

So he donned a black coat and went to church with the rest. 
There, in spite of his boredom with the whole proceeding, Rob¬ 
ert’s old tutor was a good deal more interested by Robert’s ser¬ 
mon than he had expected to be. It was on the character of 
David, and there was a note in it, a note of historical imagina¬ 
tion, a power of sketching in a background of circumstance, 
and of biting into the mind of the listener, as it were, by a de¬ 
tail or an epithet, which struck Langham as something new in 
his experience of Elsmere. He followed it at first as one might 
watch a game of skill, enjoying the intellectual form of it, and 
counting the good points, but by the end he was not a little 
carried away. The peroration was undoubtedly very moving, 
very intimate, very modern, and Langham up to a certain 
point was extremely susceptible to oratory, as he was to music 
and acting. The critical judgment, however, at the root of 
him kept coolly repeating, as he stood watching the people de¬ 
file out of the church : “ This sort of thing will go down, will 
make a mark : Elsmere is at the beginning of a career ! ” 

In the afternoon Robert, who was feeling deeply guilty 
toward his wife, in that he had been forced to leave so much 
of the entertainment of Langham to her, asked his old friend 
to come for him to the school at four o’clock and take him for 
a walk between two engagements. Langham was punctual, 
and Robert carried him off first to see the Sunday cricket, 
which was in full swing. During the past year the young 
rector had been developing a number of out-door capacities 
which were probably always dormant in his Elsmere blood, the 
blood of generations of country gentlemen, but which had 
never had full opportunity before. He talked of fishing as 
Kingsley might have talked of it, and, indeed, with constant 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


19P 


quotations from Kingsley : and liis cricket, which had been 
good enough at Oxford to get him into Iiis college eleven, had 
stood him in specially good stead with the Murewell villagers* 
That his play was not elegant they were not likely to find out ; 
his bowling they set small store by ; but his batting was of a 
fine, slashing, superior sort which soon carried the Murewell 
Club to a much higher position among the clubs of the neigh¬ 
borhood than it had ever yet aspired to occupy. 

The rector had no time to play on Sundays, however, and, 
after they had hung about the green a little while, he took 
his friend over to the Workmen’s Institute, which stood at the 
edge of it. He explained that the institute had been the last 
achievement of the agent before Henslowe, a man who had 
done his duty to the estate according to his lights, and to 
whom it was owing that those parts of it, at any rate, which 
were most in the public eye were still in fair condition. 

The institute was now in bad repair and too small for the 
place. ‘‘ But catch that man doing anything for us ! ” ex¬ 
claimed Robert hotly. “ He will hardly mend the roof now, 
merely, I believe, to spite me. But come and see my new 
Naturalists’ Club.” 

And he opened the institute door. Langham followed in 
the temper of one getting up a subject for examination. 

Poor Robert ! His labor and his enthusiasm deserved a 
more appreciative eye. He was wrapped updn his club, which 
had been the great success of his first year, and he dragged 
Langham through it all, not, indeed, sympathetic creature that 
he was, without occasional qualms. “ But after all,” he would 
say to himself, indignantly, “ I must do something with him.” 

Langham, indeed, behaved with resignation. He looked at 
the collections for the year, and was quite ready to to take it 
for granted that they were extremely creditable. Into the old- 
fashioned window-sills glazed compartments had been fitted, 
and these were now fairly filled with specimens, with eggs, 
butterflies, moths, beetles, fossils, and whatnot. A case of 
stuffed tropical birds presented by Robert stood in the center of 
the room ; another containing the birds of the district was close 
by. On a table further on stood two large open books, which 
served as records of observations on the part of members of the 
club. In one, which was scrawled over with mysterious hiero¬ 
glyphs, any one might write what he would. In the other, 
only such facts and remarks as had passed the gauntlet of a 
club meeting were recorded in Robert’s neatest hand. On the 
same table stood jars full of stran^ creatures—tadpoles and 
water larvje of all kinds, over which Robert hung now absorbed, 


200 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


poking among them with a straw, while Langham, to whom 
only the generalizations of science were congenial, stood by 
and mildly scolfed. 

As they came out a great loutish boy, who had evidently 
been hanging about waiting for the rector, came up to bini, 
boorishly touched his cap, and then, taking a card-board box 
out of his pocket, opened it with infinite caution, something 
like a tremor of emotion passing over his gnarled counte¬ 
nance. 

The rector’s eyes glistened. 

“ Hallo ! I say, Irwin, where in the name of fortune did 
you get that ? You lucky fellow ! Come in, and let’s look it 
out! ” 

. And the two plunged back into the club together, leaving 
Langham to the philosophic and patient contemplation of the 
village green, its geese, its donkeys, and its surrounding 
fringe of houses. He felt that quite indisputably life would 
have been better worth living if, like Robert, he could have 
taken passionate interest in rare moths or common plowboys ; 
but Nature having denied him the possibility, there was small 
use in grumbling. 

Presently the two naturalists came out again, and the boy 
went off, bearing his treasure with him. 

‘‘ Lucky dog ! ” said Robert, turning his friend into a 
country road leading out of the village, “ he’s found one of the 
rarest moths of the district. Such a hero he’ll be in the club 
to-morrow night. It’s extraordinary what a rational interest 
has done for that fellow ! I nearly fought him in public last 
winter.” 

And he turned to his friend with a laugh, and yet with a 
little quick look of feeling in the gray eyes. 

“ Magnificent, but not war,” said Langham dryly. ‘‘ I 
wouldn’t have given much for your chances against those 
shoulders.” 

“ Oh, I don’t know. I should have had a little science on my 
side, which counts for a great deal. We turned him out of the 
club for brutality toward the old grandmother he lives with— 
turned him out in public. Such a scene ! I shall never forg(‘t 
the boy’s face. It was like a corpse, and the eyes burning out 
of it. He made for me, but the others closed up around, and 
we got him put out.” 

“ Hard lines on the grandmother.” 

‘‘ She thought so—poor old thing ! She left her cottage that 
night, thinking he would murder her, and went to a "friend. 
At the end of a week he came into the friend’s house, where 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


201 


she was alone in bod. She cowered under the bedclothes, she 
told me, expecting him to strike her. Instead of which he 
threw his wages down beside her and gruffly invited her to 
come home. “ He would do her no mischief.” Everybod\’' 
dissuaded her, but the plucky old thing went. A week or two 
afterward she sent for me and I found her crying. She was 
sure the lad was ill, he spoke to nobody at his work. ‘ Lord, 
sir !’ she said, ‘it do remind me, when he sits glowering at 
nights, of those folks in the Bible, when the devils inside ’em 
kep’ a tearing ’em. But he’s like a new-born babe to me, sir— 
never does me no ’arm. And it do go to m}’^ heart, sir, to see 
how poorly he do take his vittles ! ’ So I made tracks for that 
lad,” said Robert, his eyes kindling, his whole frame dilating. 
“ 1 found him in the fields one morning. I have seldom lived 
through so much in half an hour. In the evening I walked him 
up to the club, and we readmitted him, and since then the boy 
has been like one clothed and in his right mind. If there is 
any trouble in the club I set him on, and he generally puts it 
right. And when I was laid up with a chill in the spring, and 
the poor fellow came trudging up every night after his work 
to ask for me—well, never mind ! but it gives one a good 
glow at one’s heart to think about it.” 

The speaker threw back his head impulsively, as though de¬ 
fying his own feeling. Langham looked at him curiously. The 
pastoral temper was a novelty to him, and the strong develop¬ 
ment of it in the undergraduate of his Oxford recollections 
had its interest. 

“A quarter to six,” said Robertas on their return from 
their walk they were descending a low-AVOoded hill above the 
village, and the church clock rung out. “ I must hurry, or I 
shall be late for my story-telling.” 

“ Story-telling ! ” said Langham, with a half-exasperated 
shrug. “ What next ? You clergy are too inventive by half ! ” 

Robert laughed a trifle bitterly. 

“ I can’t congratulate you on your epithets,” he said, thrust¬ 
ing his hands far into his pockets. Good heavens, if we 
were —if we were inventive as a body, the Church wouldn’t 
be where she is in the rural districts ! My story-telling is the 
simplest thing in the world, I began it in the winter with 
the object of somehow or other getting at the imagination 
of these rustics. Force them for only half an hour to live 
some one else’s life—it is the one thing worth doing with 
them. That’s what I have been aiming at. I told my stories 
all the winter—Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Dumas—Heaven 
knows what! And on the Avhole it answers best. But now 


202 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


we are reading ‘ The Talisman.’ Come and inspect ns, unless 
you’re a purist about your Scott! None other of the immor¬ 
tals have such longueurs as he, and we cut him freely.” 

“ By all means,” said Langham ; “ lead on.” And he fol¬ 
lowed his companion without repugnance. After all there 
was something contagious in so much youth and hopefulness. 

The story-telling was held in the institute. 

A group of men and boys were hanging round the door 
when they reached it. The two friends made their way 
thorough, greeted in the dumb, friendly English fashion on all 
sides, and Langham found himself in a room half filled with 
boys and youths, a few grown men, who had just put their 
pipes out, lounging at the back. 

Langham not only endured, but enjoyed the first part of the 
hour that followed. Robert was an admirable reader, as most 
enthusiastic, imaginative people are. He was a master of all 
those arts of look and gesture which make a spoken story tell¬ 
ing and dramatic, and Langham marveled with what energy, 
after his hard day’s work and with another service before him, 
he was able to throw himself into such a hors dj’oeume as this. 
He was reading to-night one of the most perfect scenes that 
even the Wizard of The North has ever conjured : the scene 
in the tent of Richard Lion-Heart, when the disguised slave 
saves the life of the king, and Richard first suspects his ident¬ 
ity. As he read on, his arms resting op the high desk in front 
of him, and his eyes, full of infectious enjoyment, traveling 
from the book to his audience, surrounded by human beings 
whose confidence he had won, and whose lives he w^as bright¬ 
ening from day to day, he seemed to Langham the very type 
and model of a man who had found his metier, found his niche 
in the world, and the best means of filling it. If to attain to 
an “j^adequate and masterly expression of one’s self ” be the 
aim of life, Robert was fast achieving it. This parish of 
twelve hundred souls gave him now all the scope he asked. 
It was evident he felt his work to be rather above than below 
his deserts. He was content—more than content—to spend 
ability which would have distinguished him in public life, or 
carried him far to the front in literature, on the civilizing of a 
few hundred of England’s rural poor. The future might bring 
him worldly success—Langham thought it must and would. 
Clergymen of Robert’s stamp are rare among us. But if so, it 
would be in response to no conscious eifort of his. Here in 
the country living he had so long dreaded and put from him, lest 
it should tax his young energies too lightly, he was happy— 
deeply, abundantly happy, at peace with God, at one with man. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


203 


Happy ! Langham, sitting at the outer corner of one of 
the benches, by the open door, gradually ceased to listen, 
started on other lines of thought by this realization, warm, 
stimiilating, provocative, of another man’s happiness. 

Outside the shadows lengthened across the green ; groups of 
distant children or animals passed in and out of the golden 
light-spaces ; the patches of heather left here and there glowed 
as the sunset touched them. Every now and then his eye 
traveled vaguely past a cottage garden, gay with the pinks and 
carmines of the phloxes, into the cool browns and bluish-grays 
of the raftered room beyond ; babies toddled across the road, 
with stooping mothers in their train ; the whole air and scene 
seemed to be suffused with suggestions of the pathetic expans¬ 
iveness and helplessness of human existence, which, generation 
after generation, is still so vulnerable, so confiding, so eager. 
Life after life flowers out from the darkness and sinks back 
into it again. And in the interval what agony, what disil¬ 
lusion ! All the apparatus of a universe that men may know 
what it is to hope and fail, to win and lose ! Happy !—in this 
world, “where men sit and hear each other groan.” His 
friend’s confidence only made Langham as melancholy 
as Job. 

What was it based on ? In the first place, on Christianity— 
“ on the passionate acceptance of an exquisite fairy tale,” 
said the dreaming spectator to himself, “ which at the first 
honest challenge of the critical sense withers in our grasp! 
Tliat Elsmere has never given it, and in all probability never 
will. No ! A man sees none the straighter for having a wife 
he adores, and a profession that suits him, between him and 
unpleasant facts ! ” 

In the evening Langham, with the usual reaction of his af¬ 
ternoon self against his morning self, felt that wild horses 
should not take him to church again, and, with a longing for 
something purely mundane, he stayed at home with a volume 
of Montaigne, while apparently all the rest of the household 
went to evening service. 

After a warm day the evening had turned cold and stormy ; 
the west was streaked with jagged strips of angry cloud, the 
wind was rising in the trees, and the temperature had sud¬ 
denly fallen so much that when Langham shut himself up in 
Robert’s study he did what he had been admonished to do in 
case of need, set a light to the fire, which blazed out merrily 
into the darkening room. Then he drew the curtains and 
threw himself down into Robert’s chair with a sigh of Sybaritic 
satisfaction. “ Good ! Now for something that takes the 


204 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


world less naively,” lie said to himself ; “ this house is too 
virtuous for anyth iug.” 

He opened his Montaigne and read on very happil}^ for 
half an hour. The house seemed entirely deserted. 

“ All the servants gone too ! ” he said presently, looking up 
and listening. ‘‘ Anybody who wants the spoons needn’t 
trouble about me. I don’t leave this fire.” 

And he plunged back again into his book. At last there was 
a sound of the swing-door which separated Robert’s passage 
from the front hall opening and shutting. Steps came quickly 
toward the study, the handle was turned, and there on the 
threshold stood Rose. 

He turned quickly round in-his chair with a look of astonish¬ 
ment. She also started as she saw him. 

“I did not know any one was in,” she said awkwardly, 
the color spreading over her face. “I came to look for 
a book.” 

She made a delicious picture as she stood framed in the 
darkness of the doorway, her long dress caught up round her 
in one hand, the other resting on the handle. A gust of some 
delicate perfume seemed to enter the room with her, and a 
thrill of pleasure passed through Langham’s senses. 

‘‘ Can I find anything for you ? ” he said, springing up. 

She hesitated a moment, then apparently made up her mind 
that it would be foolish to retreat, and, coming forward, she 
said, with an accent as coldly polite as she could make it: 

^‘Pray don’t disturb yourself. I know exactly where to 
find it.” 

She went up to the shelves where Robert kept his novels, 
and began running her fingers over the books, with slightly 
knitted brows and a mouth severely shut. Langham, still 
standing, watched her, and presently stepped forward. 

“You can’t reach those upper shelves,” he said; “please 
let me.” 

He was already beside her, and she gave wa}". 

“I want ‘Charles Auchester,”’ she said, still forbiddingly. 
“ It ought to be there.” 

“ Oh, that queer musical novel—I know it quite well. Ko 
sign of it here,” and he ran over the shelves with the prac¬ 
tised eye of one accustomed to deal with books. 

“ Robert must have lent it,” said Rose, with a little sigh. 
“ Never mind, please. It doesn’t matter,” and she was already 
moving away. 

“ Try some other instead,” he s?id, smiling, his arm still 
upstretched. “ Robert has no lack of choice.” His manner 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


^05 


liad an animation and ease usually quite foreign to it. Rose 
stopped, and her lips relaxed a little. 

“ He is very nearly as bad as the novel-reading bishop, who 
was reduced at last to stealing the servant’s ‘ Family Herald ’ 
out of the kitchen cupboard,” she said, a smile dawning. 

Langham laughed. 

“ Has he such an episcopal appetite for them ? That ac¬ 
counts for the fact that when he and I begin to talk novels I 
am always nowhere.” 

“ I shouldn’t have supposed you ever read them,” said Rose, 
obeying an irresistible impulse, and biting her lips the moment 
afterward. 

“ Do you think that we poor people at Oxford are always 
condemned to works on the ‘ enclitic df ’ ? ” he asked, his line 
eyes lighted up with gayety, and his head, of which the Greek 
outlines were ordinarily so much disguised by his stoop and 
hesitating look, thrown back against the books behind him. 

Natures like Langham’s, in which the nerves are never nor¬ 
mal, have their moments of felicity, balancing their weeks of 
timidity and depression. After his melanoholy of the last two 
days the tide of reaction had been mounting within him, and 
the sight of Rose had carried it to its height. 

She gave a little involuntary stare of astonishment. What 
had happened to Robert’s silent and finicking friend ? 

“ I know nothing of Oxford,” she said, a little primly, in 
answer to his question. “ I never was there—but I never was 
anywhere, I have seen nothing,” she added hastily, and, as 
Langham thought, bitterly. 

“ Except London, and the great world, and Madame Des- 
forets ! ” he answered, laughing. “ Is that so little ? ” 

She flashed a quick, defiant look at him, as he mentioned 
Mine. Desforets, but his look was imperturbably kind and gay. 
She could not help softening toward him. What magic had 
passed over him ? 

“ Do you know,” said Langham, moving, “ that you are 
standing in a draught, and that it has turned extremely cold ? ” 

For she had left the passage-door wide open behind her, 
and as the window was partially open the curtains were sway¬ 
ing hither and thither, and her muslin dress was being blown 
in coils round her feet. 

“ So it has,” said Rose, shivering. “ I don’t envy the 
Church people. You haven’t found me a book, Mr. Lang¬ 
ham ? ” 

“ I will find you one in a minute, if you will come and read 
it by the fire,” he said, with Ids hand on the door. 


20C 


nOBEBT ELSMERE. 


She glanced at the fire and at him, irresolute. Ilis breath 
quickened. She too had passed into another phase. Was it 
the natural effect of night, of solitude, of sex ? At any rate, 
she sank softly into the arm-chair opposite to that in which 
he had been sitting. 

Find me an exciting one, please.” 

Langham shut the door securely, and went back to the 
bookcase, his hand trembling a little as it passed along the 
books. He found “ Villette ” and offered it to her. She took 
it, opened it, and appeared deep in it at once. He took the 
hint and went back to his Montaigne. 

The fire crackled cheerfully, the wind outside made every 
now and then a sudden gusty onslaught on their silence, dying 
away again as abruptly as it had risen. Rose turned tlie 
pages of her book, sitting a little stiffly in her long chair, and 
Langham gradually began to find Montaigne impossible to 
read. He became instead more and more alive to every de¬ 
tail of the situation into which he had fallen. At last seeing, 
or imagining, that the fire wanted attending to, he bent for¬ 
ward and thrust the poker into it. A burning coal fell on the 
hearth, and Rose hastily withdrew her foot from the fender 
and looked up. 

“I am so sorry ! ” he interjected. Coals never do what 
you want them to do. Are you very much interested in 
‘Villette’?” 

“ Deeply,” said Rose, letting the book, however, drop on 
her lap. She laid back her head with a little sigh, which she 
did her best to check, half-way through. What ailed her to¬ 
night ? She seemed wearied ; for the moment there was no 
fight in her with anybody. Her music, her beauty, her mutin¬ 
ous mocking gayety—these things had all worked on the man 
beside her ; but this new softness, this touch of childish 
fatigue, was adorable. 

“ Charlotte Bronte wrote it out of her Brussels experience, 
didn’t she?” she resumed, languidly. “How sorry she must 
have been to come back to that dull home and that awful 
brother after such a break ! ” 

“There were reasons more than one that must have made 
her sorry to come back,” said Langham refiectively. “ But 
how she pined for her wilds all through ! I am afraid you 
don’t find your wilds as interesting as she found hers ?” 

His question and his smile startled her. 

Her first impulse was to take up her book again, as a hint to 
him that her likings were no concern of his. But something 
checked it, probably the new brilliancy of that look of his, 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


207 


which had suddenly grown so personal, so manly. Instead, 
“ Villette ” slid a little further from her hand, and her pretty 
head still lay lightly back against the cushion. 

“ No, I don’t find my wilds interesting at all,” she said for¬ 
lornly. 

“You are not fond of the people as your sister is ?” 

“Fond of them?” cried Rose hastily. “I should think 
not; and what is more, they don’t like me. It is quite intol¬ 
erable since Catherine left. I have so much more to do with 
them. My other sister and I have to do all her work. It is 
dreadful to have to work after somebody who has a genius for 
doing just what you do worst.” 

The young girl’s hands fell across one another with a little 
impatient gesture. Langham made a movement of the most 
delightful compassion toward the petulant, childish creature. 
It was as though their relative positions had been in some 
mysterious way reversed. During their two days together she 
had been the superior, and he had felt himself at the mercy of 
her scornful, sharp-eyed youth. Now, he knew not how or 
why, Fate seemed to have restored to him something of the 
man’s natural advantage, combined, for once, with the impulse 
to use it. 

“ Your sister, I suppose, has been always happy in charity ?” 
he said. 

“ Oh, dear, yes,” said Rose, irritably ; “ anything that lias 
two legs and is ill, that is all Catherine wants to make her 
happy.” 

“ And you want something quite different, something more 
exciting ? ” he asked, his diplomatic tone showing that he felt 
he dared something in thus pressing her, but dared it at least 
with his wits about him. Rose met his look irresolutely, a 
little tremor of self-consciousness creeping over her. 

“ Yes, I want something different,” she said, in a low voice, 
and paused ; then, raising herself energetically, she clasped 
her hands round her knees. “ But it is not idleness I want. 
I want to work, but at things I was born for ; I can’t have 
patience with old women, but I could slave all day and all 
night to play the violin.” 

“ You want to give yourself up to study then, and live witli 
musicians ? ” he said, quietly. 

She shrugged her shoulders by way of answer, and began 
nervously to play with her rings. 

That under-self which was the work and the heritage of 
her father in her, and which, beneath all the willfulness and 
defiances of the other self, held its own moral debates in its 


208 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


own way, well out of Catherine’s sight generally, began to 
emerge, wooed into the light by his friendly gentleness. 

“ But it is all so difficult, you see,” she ‘said despairingly. 
“ Papa thought it wicked to care about anything except 
religion. If he had lived, of couse I should never have been 
allowed to study music. It has been all mutiny so far, every 
bit of it, whatever I have been able to do.” 

“ He would have changed with^the times,” said Langham. 

“ I know he would,” cried Rose. “ I have told Catherine 
so a hundred times. People—good people—think quite dif¬ 
ferently about art now, don’t they, Mr. Langham ? ” 

She spoke with perfect naivete. He saw more and more of 
the child in her, in spite of that one striking development of 
her art. 

“ They call it the handmaid of religion,” he answered,>miling. 

Rose made a little face. 

“ I shouldn’t,” she said, with frank brevity. “ But then 
there’s something else. You know where we live—at the 
very ends of the earth, seven miles from a station, in the very 
loneliest valley of all Westmoreland. What’s to be done 
with a fiddle in such a place ? Of course, ever since i:)apa 
died I’ve just been plotting and planning to get away. But 
there’s the difficulty,” and she crossed one white finger over 
another as she laid out her case. “ That house where we live 
has been lived in by Leyburns ever since—the flood ! Horrid 
set they were, I know, because I can’t ever make mamma or 
even Catherine talk about them. But still, when papa retired, 
he came back and bought the old place from his brother. 
Such a dread; ], dreadful mistake ! ” cried the child, letting 
her hands fall over her knee. 

“ Had he been so happy there ? ” 

“ Happy ! ”—and Rose’s lip curled. “ His brothers used to 
kick and cuff him, his father was awfully unkind to him, he 
never had a day’s peace till he went to school, and after he 
went to school he never came back for years and years and 
years, till Catherine was fifteen. What could have made him 
so fond of it ? ” 

And again looking despondently into the fire she pondered 
that far-off perversity of her father’s. 

Blood has strange magnetisms,” said Langham, seized as 
he spoke by the pensive prettiness of the bent head and neck, 
“ and they show themselves in the oddest ways.” 

“ Then I wish they wouldn’t,” she said irritably. “ But 
that isn’t all. He went there, not only because he loved that 
place, but because he hated other places. I think he must 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


209 


have thought ”—and her voice dropped—“ he wasn’t going to 
live long—he wasn’t well when he gave up the school—and 
then we could grow up there safe, without any cliance of 
getting into mischief. Catherine says he thought the world 
Avas getting very wicked and dangerous and irreligious, and 
that it comforted him to know that we should be out of it.” 

Then she broke off suddenly. 

Do you know,” she went on Avistfully, raising her beautiful 
eyes to her companion, “ after all, he gave me my first violin ? ” 

Langham smiled. 

“ I like that little inconsequence,” he said. 

“ Then of course I took to it, like a duck to water, and it 
began to scare him that ! loved it so much. He and Cather¬ 
ine only loved religion, and us, and the poor. So he always 
took it away on Sundays. Then I hated Sundays, and would 
never be good on them. One Sunday I cried myself nearly 
into a fit on the dining-room floor because I mightn’t have it. 
Then he came in, and he took me up, and he tied a Scotch 
plaid round his neck, and he put me into it, and carried me 
away right up on to the hills, and he talked to me like an 
angel. He asked me not to make him sad before God that 
he had given me that violin ; so I never screamed again—on 
Sundays! ” 

Her companion’s eyes were not quite as clear as before. 

“ Poor little naughty child,” he said, bending over to her. 
“ I think your father must have been a man to be loved.” 

She looked at him, very near to weeping, her face all 
working with a soft remorse. 

Oh, so he was—so he was ! If he had been hard and 
ugly to us, why, it would have been much easier for me / but 
he was so good ! And there was Catherine just like him, 
always preaching to us what he wished. You see what a 
cliain it’s been—what a weight ! And as I must struggle— 
7rrmty because I was I—to get back into the world on the 
other side of the mountains, and do what all the dear wicked 
people there were doing, why, I have been a criminal all my 
life ! And that isn’t exhilarating always.” 

And she raised her arm and let it fall beside her with the 
quick, over-tragic emotion of nineteen. 

‘‘ I wish your father could have heard you play as I heard 
you play yesterday,” he said gently. 

She started. 

“ Did you hear me—that Wagner ? ” 

He nodded, smiling. She still looked at him, her lips 
slightly open. 


210 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


“ Do you want to know what I thought ? I have heard 
much music, you know.” 

He laughed into her eyes, as much as to say : “ I am not 
quite the mummy you thought me, after all ! ” And she 
colored slightly. 

“ I have heard every violinist of any fame in Eurojje play, 
and play often ; and it seemed to me that with time—and 
work—you might play as well as any of them.” 

The slight flush became a glow that spread from brow to 
chin. Then she gave a long breath and turned away, her 
face resting on her hand. 

“ And I can’t help thinking,” he went on, marveling in¬ 
wardly at his own role of mentor, and his strange enjoyment 
of it, “ that if your father had lived till now, and had gone 
with the times a little, as he must have gone, ho would have 
learned to take pleasure in your pleasure, and to fit your gift 
somehow into his scheme of things.” 

‘‘Catherine hasn’t moved with the times,” said Rose, 
dolefully. 

Langham was silent. Gaucherie seized him again when it 
became a question of discussing Mrs. Elsmere, his own view 
was so inconveniently empathic. 

“ And you think,” she went on, “ you really think, without 
being too ungrateful to papa, and too unkind to the old Ley- 
burn ghosts ”—and a little laugh danced through the vibrating 
voice—“ I might try and get them to give up Burwood—I 
might struggle to have my way ? I shall; of course I shall! 
I never was a meek martyr, and never shall be. But one 
can’t help having qualms, though one doesn’t tell them to 
one’s sisters and cousins and aunts. And sometimes ”—she 
turned her chin round on her hand and looked at him with a 
delicious shy impulsiveness—“ sometimes a stranger sees 
clearer. Do you, think me a monster, as Catherine does ? ” 

Even as she spoke ,her own words startled her—the con¬ 
fidence, the abandonment of them. But she held to them 
bravely ; only her eyelids quivered. She had absurdly mis¬ 
judged this man, and there was a warm penitence in her 
heart. How kind he had been, how sympathetic ! 

He rose with her last words, and stood leaning against the 
mantel-piece, looking down upon her gravely, with the air, 
as it seemed to her, of her friend, her confessor. Her white, 
childish brow, the little curls of bright hair upon her temples, 
her parted lips, the pretty folds of the muslin dress, the little 
foot on the fender—every detail of the picture impressed 
itself once for all. Langham will carry it with him to his grave. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


211 


‘^Tell me,” she said again, smiling divinely, as though to 
encourage him—“tell me quite frankly, down to the bottom, 
what you think ? ” 

The harsh noise of an opening door in the distance, and a 
gust of wind sweeping through the house, voices and steps 
approaching. Rose sprang up, and, for the first time during 
all the latter part of their conversation, felt a sharp sense of 
embarrassment. 

“ How early you are, Robert ! ” she exclaimed, as the 
study door opened, and Robert’s wind-blown head and tall 
form, wrapped in an Inverness cape, appeared on the 
threshold. “ Is Catherine tired ? ” 

“ Rather,” said Robert, the slightest gleam of surprise 
betraying itself on his face. “ She has gone to bed, and told 
me to ask you to come and say good-night to her.” 

“ You got my message about not coming from old Martha ? ” 
asked Rose. “ I met her on the common.” 

“Yes, she gave it us at the church door.” He went out 
again into the passage to hang up his great-coat. She fol¬ 
lowed, longing to tell him that it was bare accident that took 
her to the study, but she could not find words in which to do 
it, and could only say good-night a little abruptly. 

“ How tempting that fire looks !’’ said Robert, re-entering the 
stud}^. “ Were you very cold, Langham, before you lighted it?” 

“Very,” said Langham, smiling, his arm behind his head, 
his eyes fixed on the blaze ; “ but I have been delightfully 
warm and happy since.” 

CHAPTER XIV. 

Catherine stopped beside the drawing-room window with 
a start, caught by something she saw outside. 

It was nothing, however, but the figures of Rose and Lang¬ 
ham strolling round the garden. A bystander would have been 
puzzled by the sudden knitting of Catherine’s brows over it. 

Rose held a red parasol, which gleamed against the trees ; 
Dandie leaped about her, but she was too busy talking to take 
much notice of him. Talking, chattering to that cold cynic 
of a man, for whom only yesterday she had scarcely had a 
civil word ! Catherine felt herself a prey to all sorts of vague 
unreasonable alarms. 

Robert had said to her the night before, with an odd look : 
/' “ Wifie, Avhen I came in I found Langham and Rose had been 
. spending the evening together in the study. And I don’t know 
when I have seen Langham so brilliant or so alive as in our 
smoking talk just now ! ” 


212 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Catherine had laughed liim to scorn ; hnt, all the same, she 
had been a little longer going to sleep than usual. She felt her¬ 
self almost as much as ever the guardian of her sisters, and the 
old sensitive nerve was set quivering. And now there could be 
no question about it—Rose had changed her ground toward 
]Mr. Langham altogether. Her manner at breakfast was evi¬ 
dence enought of it. 

Catherine’s self-torturing mind leaped on for an instant to all 
sorts of horrors. IViat man !—and she and Robert responsible 
to her mother and her dead father ! Never ! Then she scolded 
herself back to common sense. Rose and he had discovered a 
common subject in music and musicians. That would be quite 
enough to account for the new-born friendship on Rose’s part. 
And in five more days, the limit of Langham’s stay, nothing 
very dreadful could happen, argued the reserved Catherine. 

But she was uneas}^, and after a bit, as that tete-d-tete in the 
garden still went on, she could not, for the life of her, help in¬ 
terfering. She strolled out to meet them with some woolen stuff 
hanging over her arm, and made a plaintive and smiling appeal 
to Rose to come and help her with some preparations for a 
mothers’ meeting to be held that afternoon. Rose, who was 
supposed by the family to be “ taking care ” of her sister at a 
critical time, had a moment’s prick of conscience, and went off 
with a good grace. Langham felt vaguely that he owed Mrs. 
Elsmere another grudge, but he resigned himself and took out 
a cigarette, wherewith to console himself for the loss of his 
companion. 

Presently, as he stood for a moment turning over some new 
books on the drawing-room table. Rose came in. She held an 
armful of blue serge, and, going up to a table in the wdndow, 
she took from it a little work-case, and was about to vanish 
again when Langham went up to her. 

“You look intolerably busy,” he said to her, discontentedly. 

“ Six dresses, ten cloaks, eight petticoats to cut out by lunch¬ 
eon time,” she answered demurely, with a countenance of 
most Dorcas-like seriousness, “ and if I spoil them I shall have 
to pay for the stuff ! ” 

He shrugged his shoulders and looked at her, smiling, still 
master of himself and of his words. 

“ And no music—none at all ? Perhaps you don’t know that 
I too can accompany ? ” 

“You play ! ” she exclaimed, incredulous. 

“ Try me.” 

The light of his fine black eyes seemed to encompass her. 
She moved backward a little, shaking her head. “ Not this 


nOBKRT ELSMBRE. 


213 


morning,” sbe said. “ Oh, dear, no, not this morning ! I am 
afraid you don’t know anything about tacking or fixing, or the 
abominable time they take. Well, it could hardly be expected. 
There is nothing in the world ”—and she shook her serge vin- 
dictively—“that I hate so much ! ” 

“ And not this afternoon, for Robert and I go fishing. But 
this evening?” he said, detaining her. 

She nodded lightly, dropped her lovely eyes with a sudden 
embarrassment, and went away with lightning quickness. 

A minute or two later Elsmere laid a hand on his friend’s 
shoulder. “ Come and see the Hall, old fellow. It will be 
our last chance, for the squire and his sister come back this 
afternoon. I must parochialize a bit afterward, but you shan’t 
be much victimized.” 

Langham submitted, and they sallied forth. It was a soft, 
rainy morning, one of the first heralds of autumn. Gray mists 
were drifting silently across the woods and the wide stubbles 
of the now shaven corn-field, where white lines of reapers 
were at work, as the morning cleared, making and stacking 
the sheaves. After a stormy night the garden was strewn 
with debris^ and here and there noiseless prophetic showers of 
leaves were dropping on the lawn. 

Elsmere took his guest along a bit of common, where great 
black junipers stood up like magnates in council above the 
motley undergrowth of fern and heather, and then they 
turned into the park. A great stretch of dimpled land it was, 
falling softly toward the south and west, bounded by a shin¬ 
ing twisted river, and commanding from all its highest points 
a heathery world of distance, now turned a stormy purple 
under the drooping fringes of the rain clouds. They walked 
downward from the moment of entering it, till at last, when 
they reached a wooded plateau about a hundred feet above 
the river, the house itself came suddenly into view. 

That was a house of houses ! The large main building, as 
distinguished from the lower stone portions to the north 
which represented a fragment of the older Elizabethan house, 
had been in its day the crown and boast of Jacobean house- 
architecture. It was fretted and jeweled with Renaissance 
terra-cotta work from end to end ; each gable had its lace- 
work, each window its carved setting. And yet the lines of 
the whole were so noble, genius had hit the general propor¬ 
tions so finely, that no effect of stateliness of grandeur had 
been missed through all the accumulation of ornament. 
Majestic relic of a vanished England, the house rose amid the 
August woods rich in every beauty that site and wealth and 


14 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


centuries could give to it. The river ran about it as tnough 
it loved it. The cedars wliich had kept it company for well- 
nigh two centuries gathered proudlj^ round it ; the deer 
grouped themselves in the park beneath it, as though tliey 
were conscious elements in a great whole of loveliness. 

The two friends were admitted by a house-maid who hap¬ 
pened to be busy in the hall, and whose red cheeks and 
general breathlessness bore witness to the energy of the storm 
of preparation now sweeping through the house. 

The famous hall to which Elsmere at once drew Langham’s 
attention was, however, in no way remarkable for size or 
height. It told comparatively little of seignorial dignity, but 
it was as though generation after generation had employed 
upon its perfecting the craft of its most delicate fingers, the 
love of its most fanciful and ingenious spirits. Overhead, 
the stucco-work ceiling, covered with stages and birds and 
strange heraldic creatures unknown to science, had the deep 
creamy tint, the consistency and surface of antique ivory. 
From the white and gilt frieze beneath, untouched, so Robert 
explained, since the Jacobean daj^s when it was first executed, 
hung Renaissance tapestries which would have made the 
heart’s delight of any romantic child, so rich they were in 
groves of marvelous trees hung with red and golden fruits, in 
far-reaching palaces and rock-built citadels, in flying shep¬ 
herdesses and pursuing shepherds. Between the tapestries, 
again, there were breadths of carved paneling, crowded with 
all things round and sweet, with fruits and flowers and strange 
musical instruments, with flying cherubs, and fair faces in 
laurel-wreathed medallions ; while in the middle of the wall a 
great oriel window broke the dim venerable surfaces of wood 
and tapestry with stretches of jeweled light. Tables crowded 
with antiques, Avith Tanagra figures or Greek vases, with 
Florentine bronzes or specimens of the willful, vivacious wood¬ 
carving of seventeenth-century Spain, stood scattered on the 
Persian carpets. And, to complete the whole, the gardeners 
had just been at work on the corners of the hall, and of the 
great Avindow, so that the hard-Avorn subtleties of man’s by¬ 
gone liandiAvork, with which the splendid room Avas incrusted 
from top to bottom, Avere masked and relieved here and there 
by the careless, easy splendor of floAvers, which had but to 
bloom in order to eclipse them all. 

Robert Avas at home in the great pile, where for many 
months he had gone freely in and out on his way to the 
library, and the housekeeper only met him to make an apology 
for her Avorking-dress, and to hand over to him the keys of 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


215 


the library book-cases, with the fretful comment that seemed 
to have in it the ghostly voice of generations of house-maids : 
“ Oh, Lor’, sir, they are a trouble, them books ! ” 

From the drawing-rooms, full of a more modern and less 
poetical magnificence, where Langham turned restless and re¬ 
fractory, Elsmere with a smile took his guest silently back 
into the hall, and opened a carved door behind a curtain. 
Passing through, they found themselves in a long passage 
lighted by small windows on the left-hand side. 

“ This passage, please notice,” said Robert, ‘‘ leads to noth¬ 
ing but the wing containing the library, or rather libraries, 
which is the oldest part of the house. I always enter it with a 
kind of pleasing awe ! Consider these carpets, which keep out 
every sound, and look how everything gets older as we go on.” 

For half-way down the passage the ceiling seemed to descend 
upon their heads, the flooring became uneven, and wood-work 
and walls showed that they had passed from the Jacobean 
house into the much older Tudor building. Presently Rob¬ 
ert led the way up a few shallow steps, pushed open a heavy 
door, also covered by curtains, and bade his companion enter. 

They found themselves in a low, immense ,room, running at 
right angles to the passage they had just quitted. The long 
diamond-paned window, filling almost half of the opposite 
wall, faced the door by which they had come in ; the heavy 
carved mantel-piece was on their right; an open doorway on 
their left, closed at present by tapestry hangings, seemed to 
lead into yet other rooms. 

The walls of this one were completely covered from floor to 
ceiling with latticed book-cases, inclosed throughout in a frame 
of oak carved in light classical relief by what appeared to be 
a French hand of the sixteenth century. Tlie checkered bind¬ 
ings of the books, in which the creamy tints of vellum pre¬ 
dominated, lined the whole surface of the wall with a delicate 
sobriety of color ; over the mantel-piece, the picture of the 
founder of the house—a Holbein portrait, glorious in red robes 
and fur and golden necklace—seemed to gather up and give 
voice to all the dignity and impressiveness of the room be¬ 
neath him ; while on the window-side the book-lined wall was, 
as it were, replaced by the wooded face of a hill, clothed in 
dark lines of trimmed yews, which rose abruptly about a hun¬ 
dred yards from the house and overshadowed the whole library 
wing. Between the window and the hill, however, was a 
small old English garden, closely hedged round with yew 
hedges, and blazing now with every flower that an English 
August knows—with sunflowers, tiger-lilies, and dahlias wliite 


216 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


and red. The windows was low, so that the flowers seemed 
to be actually in the room, challenging the pale tints of the 
books, the tawny browns and blues of the Persian carpet, and 
the scarlet splendors of the coiu-tier over the mantel-jiiece. 
The room was lighted up, besides, by a few gleaming casts 
from the antique, by the “ Diane Chasseresse ” of the Louvre, 
by the Hermes of Praxiteles, smiling with immortal kindness 
on the child enthroned upon his arm, and by a Donatello figure 
of a woman in marble, its subtle, sweet austerity contrasting 
with the Greek frankness and blitheness of its companions. 

Langham was penetrated at once by the S23ell of this strange 
and beautiful place. The fastidious instincts which had been 
half revolted by the costly accumulations, the overblown S|)len- 
dor of the drawing-room, were abundantly satisfied here. 

“ So it was here,” he said looking round him, “ that that 
man wrote ‘ The Idols of the Market-place ? ’ ” 

“ I imagine so,” said Robert; “ if so, he might have well 
felt a little more charity toward the human race in writing it. 
The race can not be said to have treated him badly on the 
whole. But now look, Langham, look at these books—the 
most precious things are here.” 

And he turned the key of a particular section of the wall 
which was not only latticed but glazed. 

“ Here is ‘ A Mirror for Magistrates.’ Look at the title-page; 
you will find Gabriel Harvey’s name on it. Here is the first 
edition of ‘Astrophel and Stella,’ another of the Arcadia. 
They maj" very well be presentation copies, for the Wendover 
of that day is known to have been a wit and a writer. Imag¬ 
ine finding them in situ like this in the same room, perhaps on 
the same shelves, as at the beginning. The other rooms on 
this floor have been annexed since, but this room Avas always 
a library.’’ 

Langham took the volumes reverently from Robert’s hands 
into his own, the scholar’s passion hot Avithin him. That 
glazed case was indeed a storehouse of treasures. Ben Jonson’s 
“ Underwoods” with his OAvn corrections ; a presentation copy 
of Andrew Marvell’s “ Poems,” Avith autograjdi notes ; manu¬ 
script volumes of letters, containing almost CA ery famous name 
known to English literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries, the literary cream, in fact, of all the A^ast collection 
AY dch filled the muniment room upstairs ; books which had be¬ 
longed to Addison, to Sir William Temple, to Swift, to Horace 
Walpole ; the first four folios of Shakespeare, all perfect, and 
most of the quartos—everything that the heart of the English 
collector could most desire Avas there, And the charm of it was 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


217 


that onl}^ a small proportion of these precious things repre¬ 
sented conscious and deliberate acquisition. .The great major¬ 
ity^ of them had, as it were, drifted thither one by one, carried 
there by the tide of English letters as to a warm and natural 
resting-place. 

But Robert grew impatient, and hurried on his guest to 
other things—to the shelves of French rarities, ranging from 
Du Bellay’s “ Visions,” with his autograph, down to the copy 
of “ Les Memoires d’Outre-Torabe ” presented by Chateau¬ 
briand to Mme. Recamier, or to a dainty manuscript volume 
in the fine writing of Lamartine. 

“ These,” Robert explained, “ were collected, I believe, by 
the squire’s father. He was not in the least literary, so they 
say, but it had always been a point of honor to carry on the 
library, and as he had learned French well in his youth he 
bought French things, taking advice, but without knowing 
much about them, I imagine. It was in the room overhead,” 
said Robert, laying down the book he held, and speaking in a 
lower key, “ so the old doctor of the house told me a few 
weeks ago, that the same poor soul put an end to himself 
twenty years ago.” 

‘‘ What in the name of fortune did he do that for ? ” 

“ Mania,” said Robert quietly. 

“ Whew ! ” said the other, lifting his eyebrows. “Is that 
the skeleton in this very magnificent cupboard ? ” 

“ It has been the Wendover scourge from the beginning, so 
I hear. Every one about here of course explains this man’s 
eccentricities by the familj^ history. But I don’t know,” said 
Robert, his lip hardening ; “ it may be extremely convenient 
sometimes to have a tradition of the kind. A man who knew 
how to work it might very well enjoy all the advantages of 
sanity and the privileges of insanity at the same time. The 
poor old doctor I was telling you of—old Meyrick—who has 
known the squire since his boyhood, and has a dog-like attach¬ 
ment for him, is always hinting at mysterious excuses. When¬ 
ever I let out to him, as I do sometimes, as to the state of the 
property, he talks of ‘inherited melancholy,’ ‘rash judg¬ 
ments,’ and so forth. I like the good old soul, but I don’t 
believe much of it. A man who is sane enough to make a 
great name for himself in letters is sane enough to provide 
his estate with a decent agent.” 

“ It doesn’t follow,” said Langham, who was, however, so 
deep in a collection of Spanish romances and chronicles that 
the squire’s mental history did not seem to make much im¬ 
pression upon him. “ Most men of letters are mad, and I 


218 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


should be inclined,” he added, with a sudden and fretful em¬ 
phasis, ‘‘to argue much worse things for the sanity of your 
squire, Elsmere, from the fact that this room is undoubtedly 
allowed to get damp sometimes, than from any of those absurd 
parochial tests of yours.” 

And he held up a couple of priceless books, of which the 
Spanish sheepskin bindings showed traces here and there of 
moisture. 

“ It is no . use, I know, expecting you to preserve a moral 
sense when jmu get among books,” said Robert, wdth a shrug. 
“ I will reserve my remarks on that subject. But you must 
really tear yourself away from this room, Langham, if you 
want to see the rest of the squire’s quarters. Here you have 
what we may call the ornamental, sensational part of the 
library, that part of it which would make a stir at Sotheby’s ; 
the working parts are all to come.” 

Langham reluctantly allowed himself to be dragged away. 
Robert held back the hangings over the doorway leading into 
the rest of the wing, and, passing through, they found them¬ 
selves in a continuation of the library totally different in char¬ 
acter from the magnificent room they had just left. The 
walls were no longer latticed and carved ; they were closely 
packed, in the most business-like way, with books which rep¬ 
resented the squire’s own collection, and were in fact a chart 
of his own intellectual history. 

“ This is how I interpret this room,” said Robert, looking 
round it. “ Here are the books he collected at Oxford in the 
Tractarian Movement and afterward. Look here,” and he 
pulled out a volume of St. Basil. 

Langham looked, and saw on the title-page a note, in faded 
characters : “ Given to me by Newman at Oxford^ in 1845 .” 

“ Ah, of course, he was one of them in ’45 ; he must have 
left them very soon after,” said Langham reflectively. 

Robert nodded. “ But look at them ! There are the 
Tracts, all the Fathers, all the Councils, and masses, as you 
see, of Anglican theology. Now look at the next case, nothing 
but eighteenth century ! ” 

“ I see from the Fathers to the Philosophers, from Hooker 
to Hume. How history repeats itself in the individual ! ” 

“ And there again,” said Robert, pointing to the other side 
of the room, “ are the results of his life as a German stu¬ 
dent.” 

“ Germany—ah, I remember ! How long was he there ? ” 

“ Ten years at Berlin and Heidelberg. According to old 
Meyrick, he buried his last chance of living like other men at 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


219 


Berlin. His years of extravagant labor have left marks upon 
him physically that can never be effaced. But that book-case 
fascinates me. Half the great names of modern thought are 
in those books.” 

And so they were. The first Langham opened had a Latin 
dedication in a quavering old man’s hand : Amico et discipulo 
meo,” signed “ Fredericus Gulielmus Schelling.” The next 
bore the autograph of Alexander von Humbojdt, the next that 
of Boeckh, the famous classic, and so on. Close by was Nie¬ 
buhr’s “ History,” in the title-page of which a few lines in 
the historian’s handwriting bore witness to much “ pleasant 
discourse between the writer and Roger Wendover, at Bonn, 
in the summer of 1847.” Judging from other shelves further 
down, he must also have spent some time, perhaps an academic 
year, at Tiibingen, for here were most of the early editions of 
the “ Leben Jesu,” with some corrections from Strauss’s hand, 
and similar records of Baur, Ewald, and other members or 
opponents of the Tubingen school. And so on, through the 
whole book-case. Something of everything was there—philo¬ 
sophy, theology, history, philology. The collection was a 
medley, and made almost a spot of disorder in the exquisite 
neatness and system of the vast gathering of which it formed 
part. Its bond of union was simply that it represented the 
forces of an epoch, the thoughts, the men, the occupations 
which had absorbed the energies of ten golden years. Every 
book seemed to be full of paper marks ; almost every title- 
page was covered with minute writing, which, when examined, 
proved to contain a record of lectures, or conversations with 
the author of the volume, sometimes a string of anecdotes or 
a short biography, rapidly sketched out of the fullness of per¬ 
sonal knowledge, and often seasoned with a subtle causticity 
and wit. A history of modern thinking Germany, of that 
‘‘ unextinguished hearth ” when the mind of Europe has been 
kindled for three generations, might also have been evolved 
from that book-case and its contents alone. 

Langham, as he stood peering among the ugly, vilely printed 
German volumes, felt suddenly a kind of magnetic infiuence 
creeping over him. The room seemed instinct with a harsh, 
commanding presence. The history of a mind and soul was 
written upon the face of it ; every shelf, as it were, was an 
autobiographical fragment, an “ Apologia pro Yita Mea.” He 
drew away from the books at last with the uneasy feeling of 
one who surprises a confidence, and looked for Robert. Rob¬ 
ert was at the end of the room, a couple of volumes under his 
arm, another, which he was reading, in his hands. 


220 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


“ This is my corner,” he said, smiling and flushing a little^ 
as his friend moved up to liini. “ Perhaps you don’t know 
that I too am engaged upon a great work.” 

“ A great work—you ? ” 

Langham looked at his companion as though to find out 
whether his remark was meant seriously or whether he might 
venture to be cynical. Elsmere writing ! Why should every¬ 
body write books ? It was absurd ! The scholar who knows 
what toll scholarship takes of life is always apt to resent the 
intrusion of the man of action into his domains. It looks to 
him like a kind of ridiculous assumption that an one cVun cmir 
leger can do what has cost him his heart’s blood. 

Robert understood something of the meaning of his tone, 
and replied almost apologetically ; he was always singularly 
modest about himself on the intellectual side. 

“ Well, Grey is responsible. He gave me such a liomily be¬ 
fore I left Oxford on the absolute necessity of keeping uj) 
Avith books, that I could nothing less than set up a ‘ subject ’ 
at once. ‘ Half the day,’ he used to say to me, ‘ you will be 
king of your world ; the other half be the slave of something 
which will take you out of your Avorld into the general world ’; 
and then he Avould quote to me that saying he was always 
bringing into lectures—I forget Avhose it is—‘ The decisive 
events of the loorld take place in the intellect. It is the mission 
of books that they help one to remember it.’ Altogether it 
Avas striking, coming from one who has always had such a 
tremendous respect for practical life and Avork, and I Avas 
much impressed by it. So blame him ! ” 

Langham Avas silent. Elsmere had noticed than any allu¬ 
sion to Grey found Langham less and less responsive. 

“ Well, Avhat is the ‘ great work’ ? ” he said at last, abruptly. 

“ Historical. Oh, I should have written something Avithout 
Grey ; I haAm ahvays had a turn for it since I Avas a child. But 
he was clear that history Avas especially valuable—especially 
necessary to a clergyman. I felt he was right, entirely right. 
So I took m}^ Final Schools’ history for a basis, and started on 
the Empire, especially the decay of the Empire. Some day I 
mean to take up one of the episodes in the great birth of 
Europe—the makings of France, I think, most likely. It 
seems to lead furtherest and tell most. I have been at work 
now nine months.” 

“ And are just getting into it ? ” 

“Just about. I have got doAvn below the surface, and am 
beginning to feel the joys of digging”; and Robert threw 
back his head Avith one of his most brilliant enthusiastic smiles. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


221 


‘‘I have been shy about boring you with the thing, but the 
fact is, I am very keen, indeed ; and this library has been a 
godsend ! ” 

“ So I should think.” Langham sat down on one of the 
carved wooden stools placed at intervals along the book-eases 
and looked at his friend, his psychological curiosity rising a 
little. 

“ Tell me,” he said presently—tell me what interests you 
specially—what seizes you—in a subject like the making of 
France, for instance ? ” 

“ Do you really want to know ? ” said Robert incredulously. 

The other nodded. Robert left his place, and began to walk 
up and down, trying to, answer Langham’s question, and at 
the same time to fix in speech a number of sentiments and im¬ 
pressions bred in him by the work of the past few months. 
After a while Langham began to see his way. Evidently the 
forces at the bottom of this new historical interest were pre¬ 
cisely the same forces at work in Elsmere’s parish plans, in his 
sermons, in his dealings with the poor and the young—forces 
of imagination and sympathy. What was enchaining him to 
this new study was not, to begin with, that patient love of in¬ 
genious accumulation which is the learned temper proper, the 
temper, in short, of science. It was simply a passionate sense of 
the human problems which underlie all the dry and dusty detail 
of history and give it tone and color, a passionate desire to 
rescue something more of human life from the drowning, sub¬ 
merging past, to realize for himself and others the solidarity 
and continuity of mankind’s long struggle from the beginning 
until now. 

Langham had had much experience of Elsmere’s versatility 
and pliancy, but he had never realized it so much as now, while 
he sat listening to the vivid, many-colored speech getting 
quicker and quicker, and more and more telling and original as 
Robert got more absorbed and excited by what he had to say. 
He was endeavoring to describe to Langham the sort of book 
he thought might be written on the rise of modern society in 
Gaul, dwelling first of all on the outward spectacle of the blood¬ 
stained Frankish world as it was, say, in the days of Gregory 
the Great, on its savage kings, its fiendish women, its bishops 
and its saints ; and then, on the conflict of ideas going on be¬ 
hind all the fierce incoherence of the Empire’s decay, the strug¬ 
gle of Roman order and of German freedom, of Roman luxury 
and of German hardness ; above all the war of orthodoxy and 
heresy, with its strange political complications. And then, dis¬ 
contented still, as though the heart of the matter were still un- 


222 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


toiicb^d, he went on, restlessly wandering the while, with his 
long arms linked behind him, “ throwing out ” words at an ob¬ 
ject in his mind, trying to grasp and analyze that strange sense 
which haunts the student of Rome’s decline as it once over¬ 
shadowed the infancy of Europe, that sense of a slowly de¬ 
parting majesty, of a great presence just withdrawn, and 
still incalculably potent, traceable throughout in that hum¬ 
bling consciousness of Goth or Frank that they were but “ beg¬ 
gars hunting in a palace—the place had harbored greater men 
than they! ” 

“ There is one thing,” Langham said presently, in his slow, 
nonchalant voice, when the tide of Robert’s ardor had ebbed for 
a moment, “ that doesn’t seem to have touched you yet. But 
you will come to it. To my mind, it makes almost the chief 
interest of history. It is just this. History depends on testi- 
mony. What is the nature and value of the testimony at 
given times ? In other words, did the man of the third cen¬ 
tury understand, or report, or interpret facts in the same way 
as the man of the sixteenth or the nineteenth ? And if not, 
what are the differences, and what are the deductions to be 
made from them, if any ? ” He fixed his keen look on Robert, 
who was now lounging against the books, as though his 
harangue had taken it out of him a little. 

“Ah, w'ell,” said the rector, smiling, “I am only just com¬ 
ing to that. As I told you, I am only now beginning to dig 
for myself. Till now it has all been work at second hand. I 
have been getting a general survey of the ground as quickly as 
I could with the help of other men’s labors. Now, I must go 
to work inch by inch and find out what the ground is made 
of. I won’t forget your point. It is enormously important, I 
grant—enormously,” he repeated, reflectivel}''. 

“ I should think it is,” said Langham to himself, as he rose ; 
“ the whole of orthodox Christianity is in it, for instance.” 

There was not much more to be seen. A little wooden 
staircase led from the second library to the upper rooms, 
curious old rooms, which had been annexed one by one as the 
squire wanted them, and in which there was nothing at all— 
neither chair, nor table, nor carpet—but books only. All the 
doors leading from room to room had been taken off ; the old 
worm-eaten boards had been roughly stained ; a few old 
French engravings had been hung here and there where the 
encroaching books left an opening ; but otherwise all was 
bare. There was a curious charm in the space and air of 
these empty rooms, with their latticed windows opening on 
to the hill, and letting in day by day the summer sun-risings 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


223 


or tlie winter dawns, which had shone upon them for more 
than three centuries. 

“ Tliis is iny last day of privilege,” said Robert. “ Every¬ 
body is shut out when once he appears, from this wing, and 
this part of the grounds. This was his father’s room,” and 
the rector led the way into the last of the series ; ‘‘and 
through there,” pointing to a door on the right, “ lies the way 
to liis own sleeping-room, which is of course connected with 
the more modern side of the house.” 

“ So this is Avhere the old man ventured ‘ Avhat Cato did and 
Addison approved,’ ” murmured Langham, standing in the 
middle of the room and looking round him. This particular 
room Avas noAV used as a sort of lumber place, a receptacle for 
the superfluous or useless books gradually throAvn off by the 
great collection all around. There Avere innumerable volumes 
in frayed or broken bindings l3dng on the ground. A musty 
smell hung over it all ; the gray light from outside, which 
seemed to give only an added subtlety and charm to the 
other portions of the ancient building through Avhich they had 
been moving, seemed here triste and dreary. Or Langham 
fancied it. 

He passed tlie threshold again Avith a little sigh, and saAV 
suddenly before him at the end of the suite of rooms, and 
framed in the doorAvays facing him, an engraving of a Greuze 
picture—a girl’s face turned over her shoulder, the hair Avav- 
ing about her temples, tlie lips parted, the teeth gleaming 
mirth and provocation and tender yielding in every line. 
Langham started, and the blood rushed to his heart. It Avas 
as though Rose herself stood there and beckoned to him. 

CHAPTER XV. 

“ How, having seen our sight,” said Robert, as they left 
the great mass of MureAvell behind them, “ come and see our 
scandal. Both run b}’’ tlie same proprietor, if you please. 
There is a hamlet down there in the hollow ”—and he pointed 
to a gray speck in the distance—“ Avhich deserves a royal com¬ 
mission all to itself, which is a disgrace"''^ — and his tone 
Avarmed—“ to any country, any owner, any agent ! It is 
owned by Mr. Wendover, and I see tlie pleasing prospect 
straight before me of beginning my acquaintance Avith him by 
a fight over it. You Avill admit that it is a little hard on a 
man who wants to live on good terms Avith the possessor of the 
JMureAA^ell library to have to open relations with him by a 
fierce attack on his drains and his pigsties.” 

He turned to his companion with a half-rueful spark of 


224 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


laughter in his gray eyes. Langham hardly caught what he 
said. He was far away in meditations of his own. 

“ An attack,” he repeated vaguely ; “ why an attack ? ” 
Robert plunged again into the great topic of which his 
quick mind was evidently full. Langham tried to listen, but 
was conscious that his friend’s social enthusiasms bored him a 
great deal. And side by side with the consciousness there 
slid in a little stinging reflection tliat four years ago no talk 
of Elsmere’s could have bored him. 

“ What’s the matter with this particular place ?”^he asked 
languidly, at last, raising his e 3 ^es toward the group of 
houses now beginning to emerge from the distance. 

An angry red mounted in Robert’s cheek. 

“ What isn’t the matter with it ? The houses, which were 
built on a swamp originally, are falling into ruin ; the roofs, 
the drains, the accommodation per head, are all about equally 
scandalous. The place is harried with illness ; since I came 
there has been both fever and diphtheria there. They are all 
crippled with rheumatism, but that they think nothing of; the 
English laborer takes rheumatism as quite in the day’s bar¬ 
gain ; And as to vice —the vice that comes of mere endless 
persecuting opportunity—I can tell you one’s ideas of per¬ 
sonal responsibility get a good deal shaken up bp a place like 
this. And I can do nothing. I brought over Henslowe to see 
the place, and he behaved like a brute. He scoffed at all my 
complaints, said that no landlord would be such a fool as to 
build fresh cottages on such a site, but the old ones must just 
be allowed to go to ruin ; that the people might live in them 
if they chose, or turn out of them if they chose. Nobody 
forced them to do either ; it was their own lookout.” 

That was true,” said Langham, “ wasn’t it ? ” 

Robert turned upon him fiercelj^ 

“ Ah ! you think it so easy for those poor creatures to leave 
their homes, their working places ! Some of them have been 
there thirty years. They are close to the two or three farms 
that employ them, close to the osier beds which give them 
extra earnings in the spring. If they were turned out, there 
is nothing nearer than Murewell, and not a single cottage to 
be found there. 1 don’t sa}^ it is a landlord’s duty to provide 
more cottages than are wanted ; but if the labor is wanted the 
laborer should be decently housed. He is worthy of his hire, 
and woe to the man who neglects or ill-treats him ? ” 

Langham could not help smiling, partly at the vehemence 
of the speech, and partly at the lack of adjustment between 
Ins friend’s mood and his own. He braced himself to take the 


liOBERT ELSMEBE. 


220 

matter more seriously, but meauwliile Robert had caught the 
smile, and Ids angry eyes melted at once into laughter. 

“ There I am, ranting again as usual,” he said, penitently. 
“ Took you for Henslowe, I suppose ! Ah, well, never mind. 
I hear the provost has another book on the stocks.” 

So they diverged into other things, talking politics and new 
books, public men and what not, till at the end of a long and 
gradual descent through Avooded ground, some two miles to 
the northwest^of the park, they emerged from the trees be¬ 
neath which the^’- had been Avalking, and found themselves on 
a bridge, a gray sluggish stream flowing beneath them, and 
the hamlet they sought rising among the river flats on the 
further side. 

There,” said Robert, stopping, ‘‘ we are at our journey’s 
end. Now, then, Avhat sort of a place of human habitation do 
you call that P ” 

The bridge whereon they stood crossed the main channel of 
the river, which just at that point, however, parted into sev¬ 
eral branches, and came meandering slowly down through a 
little bottom or valley, filled with osier beds, long since robbed 
of their year’s growth of shoots. On the other side of the 
river on ground all but level with the osier beds Avhich inter¬ 
posed between them and the stream, rose a miserable group of 
houses, huddled together as though their bulging walls and rot¬ 
ten roofs could only maintain themselves at all by the help and 
support which each wretched hovel gave to its neighbor. The 
mud walls Avere stained Avith yellow patches of lichen, the 
palings round the little gardens were broken and ruinous. 
Close beside them all v/as a sort of open drain or Avatercourse, 
stagnant and noisome, Avhich dribbled into the river a little 
above the bridge. Behind them rose a high gravel bank edged 
by firs, and a line of oak-trees against the sky. The liouses 
stood in the shadoAV of the bank looking north, and on this 
gray, lowering day, the dreariness, the gloom, the squalor of 
the place were indescribable. 

“ Well, that is a God-forsaken hole ! ” said Langham, studj^- 
ing it, his interest roused at last, rather, perhaps, by the Ruys- 
dael-like melancholy and picturesqueness of the scene than by 
its human suggestiveness. “ I could hardly have imagined 
such a place existed in southern England. It is more like a bit 
of Ireland.” 

“ If it Avere Ireland it might be to somebody’s interest to 
ferret it out,” said Robert bitterly. “ But these poor folks are 
out of the world. They may be brutalized AAUtli impunity. 
Oh, such a case as I had here last autumn ! A young girl of 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


sixteen or seventeen, who would have been healthy and happy 
anywhere else, stricken by the damp and the poison of the 
place, dying in six weeks, of complications due to nothing in 
the world but preventable cruelty and neglect ! I tried, of 
course, to move her, but neither she nor her parents—elderly 
folk—had energy enough for a change. They only pra^^ed to . 
be let alone. I came over the last evening of her life to give 
her the communion. ‘ Ah, sir ! ’ said the mother to me—not 
bitterly—that is the strange thing, they have so little bitter¬ 
ness—‘if Mister’Enslowe would just’a meaided that bit o’^ 
roof of ours last winter, Bessie needn’t have laid in the wet so 
manj^ nights as she did, and she coughin’ fit to break your 
heart, for all the things yer could put over ’er.’ ” 

Robert paused, his strong young face, so vehemently angry 
a few minutes before, tremulous with feeling. “Ah, well,” 
he said at last, with a long breath, moving away from the 
parapet of the bridge on which he had been leaning, “ better 
be oppressed than oppressor, any day. Now, then, I must 
deliver my stores. There’s a child here, Catherine and I have 
been doing our best to pull through typhoid.” 

They crossed the bridge and turned down the track leading 
to the hamlet. Some planks carried them across the ditch, 
the main sewer of the community, as Robert pointed out, and 
they made their way through the filth surrounding one of the 
iieares^t cottages. 

A feeble, elderly man, whose shaking limbs and sallow, blood¬ 
less skin make him look much older than he actually was, 
opened the door and invited them to come in. Robert passed 
on into an inner room, conducted thither by a woman who had 
been sitting working over the fire. Langham stood irresolute 
but the old man’s quavering “ Kindly take a chair, sir ; you’ve 
come a long way,” decided him, and* he stepped in. 

Inside the hovel was miserable, indeed. It belonged to that 
old and evil type which the efforts of the last twenty years 
have done so much all over England to sweep away ; four 
mud walls, inclosing an oblong space about eight yards long, 
divided into two unequal portions by a lath and plaster par¬ 
tition, with no upper story, a thatched roof, now entirely out 
of repair, and letting in the rain in several places, and a paved 
floor little better than the earth itself, so large and cavernous 
wene the gaps between the stones. The dismal place had no 
small adornings—none of those little superfluities which, how¬ 
ever ugly and trivial, are still so precious in the dwellings of 
the poor, as showing the existence of some instinct or passion 
which is not the creation of the sheerest physical need ; and 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


22V 


Laiigham, as lie sat down, caught the sickening marsh smell 
which the Oxford man, accustomed to the odors of damp 
meadows in time of ebbing flood and festering sun, knows so 
well. As old Milsom began to talk to him in his weak, trem¬ 
ulous voice, the visitor’s attention was irresistibly held by the 
details about him. Fresh as he was from all the delicate 
»sights, the harmonious colors and delightful forms of the 
’ squire’s house, they made an unusually sharp impression on 
his fastidious senses. What does human life become lived on 
reeking floors and under stifling roofs like these ? What strange 
abnormal deteriorations, physical and spiritual, must it not 
inevitably undergo ? Langham felt a sudden inward movement 
of disgust and repulsion. “ For heaven’s sake, keep your 
superstitions ! ” he could have cried to the whole human race, 
“ or any other narcotic that a grinding fate has left you. 
What does anything matter to the mass of mankind but a little 
ease, a little lightening, of pressure on this side or on that ? ” 

Meanwhile the old man went maundering on, talking of the 
weather, and of his sick child, and “ Mr. Elsmere,” with a kind 
of listless incoherence which hardly demanded an answer, 
though Langham threw in a word or two here and there. 

Among other things he began to ask a question or two 
about Robert’s predecessor, a certain Mr. Preston, who had 
left behind him a memory of amiable evangelical indolence. 

“ Did you see much of him ? ” he asked. 

“ Oh, law no, sir ! ” replied the man, surprised into some¬ 
thing like energy. “ Never seed ’im more ’n once a year, and 
sometimes not that ! ” 

“ Was he liked here ? ” 

“ Well, sir, it was like this, you see. My wife, she’s north- 
country, she is, comes from Yorkshire ; sometimes she’d used 
' to say to me : ‘ Passon ’ee ain’t much good, and passon ’ee 
ain’t much harm. • Ee’s no more good nor more ’arm, so fer 
as 1 can see, nor a chip in a basin o’ parritch.’ And that was 
just about it, sir,” said the old man, pleased for the hundredth 
time with his wife’s by-gone flight of metaphor and his own 
exact memory of it. 

As to the rector’s tendance of his child, his tone was very 
cool and guarded. 

“ It do seem strange, sir, as nor he nor Doctor Grimes ’ull 
let her have anything to put a bit of flesh on her, nathin’ but 
them messy things as he brings—milk an’ that. An’ the beef 
jelly—lor’, such a trouble ! Missis Elsmere, he tells my wife, 
strains all the stuff through a cloth, she do ; never seed any' 
thin’ like it, nor my wife neither. People is clever nowada^^s,” 


228 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


said tlie speaker dubiously. Laiigbam realized that, in tins 
quarter of his parish at any rate, his friend’s pastoral vanity, 
if he had any,'would not find much to feed on. Nothing, to 
judge from this specimen at least, greatly affected an inhabi¬ 
tant of Mile End. Gratitude, responsiveness, imply health 
and energy, past or present. The only constant defense which 
the poor have against such physical conditions as those which 
prevailed at Mile End is apathy. 

As they came down the dilapidated steps at the cottage 
door Robert drew in with avidity a long draught of the 
outer air. 

“ Ugli! ” he said, with a sort of groan, “that bedroom! 
Nothing gives one such a sense of the toughness of human 
life as to see a child recovering, actually recovering, in such a 
pestilential den ! Father, mother, grown-up son, a girl of 
thirteen, and grandchild, all huddled in a space just fourteen 
feet square. Langham ! ” and he turned passionately on his 
companion, “what defense can be found for a man who lives 
in a place like Murewell Hall, and can take money from human 
beings for the use of a sty like that ? ” 

“ Gently, my friend. Perhaps the squire, being the sort of 
recluse he is, has never seen the place, or, at any rate, not for 
years, and knows nothing about it! ” 

“ More shame for him ! ” 

“ True in a sense,” said Langham, a little dryly ; “ but as 
you may want hereafter to make excuses for your man, and 
he may give you occasion, I wouldn’t begin by painting him 
to yourself any blacker than need be.” 

Robert laughed, sighed and acquiesced. “ I am a hot- 
beaded, impatient kind of creature at the best of times,” he 
confessed. “ They tell me that great things have been done 
for the poor round here in the last twenty years. Something 
has been done, certainly. But why are the old ways, the old 
evil neglect and apathy, so long, so terribly long in dying ! 
This social progress of ours we are so proud of is a clumsy, 
limping jade at best ! ” 

They prowled a little more about the hamlet, every step 
almost revealing some new source of poison and disease. Of 
their various visits, however, Langham remembered nothing 
afterward but a little scene in a miserable cottage, where they 
found a whole family party gathered round the midday meal. 
A band of puny, black, black-eyed children were standing or 
sitting at the table. The wife, confined of twins three weeks 
before, sat by the fire, deathlj?- pale, a “ bad leg ” stretched 
out before her on some improvised support, one baby on her 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


229 


lap and another dark-haired bundle asleep in a cradle beside 
her. There was a pathetic, pinched beauty about the whole 
family. Even the tiny twins were comparatively shapely ; all 
the other children had delicate transparent skins, large eyes, 
and small colorless mouths. The father, a picturesque, hand¬ 
some fellow, looking as though he had gypsy blood in his 
veins, had opened the door to their knock. Robert, seeing 
the meal, would have retreated at once, in spite of the 
children’s shy inviting looks, but a glance past them at the 
mother’s face checked the word of refusal and apology on 
his lips, and he stepped in. 

In after-years Langham was always apt to see him in imag¬ 
ination as he saw him then, standing beside the bent figure of 
the mother, his quick pitiful eyes taking in the pallor and ex¬ 
haustion of face and frame, his hand resting instinctively on 
the head of a small creature that had crept up beside him, his 
look all attention and softness as the woman feebly told him 
some of the main facts of her state. The young rector at the 
moment might have stood for the modern “ Man of Feeling,” 
as sensitive, as impressionable, and as free from the burden of 
self as his eighteejith-century prototype. 

On the way home Robert suddenly remarked to his com¬ 
panion : ‘‘ Have you heard my sister-in-law play yet, Lang¬ 
ham ? What did you think of it ? ” 

“ Extraordinary ! ” said Langham briefly. “ The most 
considerable gift I ever came across in an amateur.” 

His olive cheek flushed a little involuntarily. Robert 
threw a quick, observant look at him. 

“The difticulty,” he exclaimed, “ is to know what to do 
with it ! ” 

“ Why do you make the difticulty ? I gather she Avants to 
study abroad. What is there to prevent it ? ” 

Langham turned to his companion Avith a touch of asperity. 
He could not stand it that Elsmere should be so much 
narroAved and warped by that wife of his, and her prejudices. 
Why should that gifted creature be cribbed, cabined, and 
confined in this AA^ay ? 

“ I grant you,” said Robert, with a look of perplexity, 
“ there is not much to prevent it.” 

And he Avas silent a moment, thinking, on his side, very 
tenderly of all the antecedents and explanations of that old- 
Avorld distrust of art and the artistic life so deeply rooted in 
his wife, even though in practice and under his influence she 
had made concession after concession. 

“ The great solution of all,” he said presently, brightening, 


230 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


“ would be to get her married. I don’t wonder her belongings 
dislike the notion of anything so pretty and so flighty going 
off to live by itself. And to break up the home in Whindale 
would be to undo everything their father did for them, to 
defy his most solemn last wishes.” 

“ To talk of a father’s wishes, in a case of this kind, ten 
years after his death, is surel}''excessive ? ” said Langham, with 
dry interrogation ; then, suddenly recollecting himself, “ I beg 
your pardon, Elsmere. I am interfering.” 

“ Nonsense.” said Robert brightly, “ I don’t wonder it' 
seems like a difficulty of our own making. Like so many dif¬ 
ficulties, it depends on character, present character, by-gone 
character—” And again he fell musing on his Westmoreland 
experiences, and on the intensity of that Puritan t^^pe it had 
revealed to him. “ However, as I said, marriage would be the 
natural way out of it.” 

“ An easy way, I should think,” said Langham, after a pause. 

“ It won’t be so easy to find the right man. She is a young 
person with a future, is Miss Rose. She wants somebody in 
the stream ; somebody with a strong hand who will keep her 
in order and yet give her a wide range; a rich man, I think— 
she hasn’t the ways of a poor man’s wife; but, at any rate, 
some one who will be proud of her, and yet have a full life of 
his own in which she may share.” 

“Your views are extremely clear,” said Langham, and his 
smile had a touch of bitterness in it. “ If hers agree, I proph¬ 
esy you won’t have long to wait. She has beauty, talent, charm 
—everything that rich and important men like.” 

There was the slightest sarcastic note in the voice. Robert 
winced. It was borne in upon one of the least worldly of mor¬ 
tals that he had been talking like the veriest schemer. What 
vague, quick impulse had driven him on ? 

By the time they emerged again upon the Murewell Green 
the rain had cleared altogether awaj’-, and the autumnal morn¬ 
ing had broken into sunshine, whicli played mistily on the 
sleeping woods, on the white fronts of the cottages, and the 
wide green Avhere the rain-pools glistened. On the hill leading 
to the rectory there was the flutter of a woman’s dress. As 
they hurried on, afraid of being late for luncheon, they saw 
that it was Rose in front of them. 

Langham started as the slender figure suddenlj^ defined it¬ 
self against the road. A tumult within, half rage, half feeling, 
showed itself only in an added rigidity of the finely cut feat¬ 
ures. 

Rose turned dii'ectly she heard the steps and voices, and 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


231 


over the (Ireamiiiess of lier face tliere flashed a sudden bright¬ 
ness. 

\ on have been a long time! ” she exclaimed, saying the first 
thing that came into here head, joyously, rashly, like the child 
she in reality Avas. “ Hoav many halt and maimed has Robert 
taken yon to see, Mr. Langham ? ” 

“ We Av^ent to Mure well first. The libraiy Avas AA^ell Avorth 
seeing. Since then we have been a parish round, distributing 
stores.” 

Rose’s look changed in an instant. The words were spoken 
by the Langham of her earliest acquaintance. The man who 
that morning had asked her to play to him had gone—A'anished 
aAvay. 

“ Hoav exhilarating! ” she said scornfully. “ Don’t you Avon- 
der how any one can tear themselves away from the countiT? ” 

“ Rose, don’t be abusive,” said Robert, opening his eyes at 
her tone. Then, passing his arm through hers, he looked ban- 
teringly down upon her. “For the first time since you left 
the metropolis you have Avalked yourself into a color. It’s be¬ 
coming—and it’s MurcAA^ell—so be chdl ! ” 

“Oh, nobody denies you a high place in milkmaids !” she 
said, with her head in air—and they AA^ent off into a minute’s 
sparring. 

Meanwhile Langham, on the other side of the road, Avalked 
up sloAvly, his eyes on the ground. Once, when Rose’s eye 
caught him, a shock ran through her. There was already a 
look of slovenly age about his stooping bookworm’s gait. ITer 
companion of the night before—handsome, animated, human— 
where AA^as he ? The girl’s heart felt a singular contraction. 
Then she turned and rent herself, and Robert found her more 
mocking and sprightly than ever. 

At the rectory gate Robert ran on to overtake a farmer on 
the road. Rose stooped to open the latch ; Langham mechan¬ 
ically made a quick movement forward to anticipate her. 
Their fingers touched; she dreAv hers hastily away and passed 
in, an erect and dignified figure, in her curving garden hat. 

Langham Avent straight up to his room, shut the door, and 
stood before the open AvindoAV, deaf and blind to everything 
save an inAA^ard storm of sensation. 

“ Fool! Idiot! ” he said to himself at last, Avitli fierce stifled 
emphasis, Avhile a kind of dumb fury Avith himself and circum¬ 
stances SAvept through him. 

That he, the poor and solitary student Avhose only sources of 
self-respect lay in the deliberate limitations, the reasoned aiul 
reasonable renunciations he had imposed upon liis life, shoukl 


232 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


have needed the reminder of his old pupil not to fall in love 
with his brilliant, ambitious sister ! His irritable self-con¬ 
sciousness enormously magnified Elsmere’s motive and Els- 
mere’s words. That golden vagueness and softness of temper 
which had possessed him since his last sight of her gave place 
to one of bitter tension. 

With sardonic scorn he pointed out to himself that his imag¬ 
ination was still held by, his nerves were still thrilling under, 
the mental image of a girl looking up to him as no woman had 
ever looked—a girl, white-armed, white-necked—with softened 
©yes of appeal and confidence. He bade himself mark that 
during the whole of his morning walk with Robert down to its 
last stage, his mind had been really absorbed in some prepos¬ 
terous dream he was now too self-contemptuous to analyze. 
Pretty well for a philosopher, in four days ! What a ridicu¬ 
lous business is life—what a contemptible creature is man, 
how incapable of dignity, of consistency ! 

At luncheon he talked rather more than usual, especially on 
literary matters with Robert. Rose, too, was fully occupied 
in giving Catherine a sarcastic account of a singing lesson she 
had been administering in the school that morning. Catherine 
winced sometimes at the tone of it. 

Tliat afternoon Robert, in high spirits, his rod over his 
shoulder, his basket at his back, carried off his guest for a 
lounging afternoon along the river. Elsmere enjoj^ed these 
fishing expeditions like a boy. They were his holidays, rel¬ 
ished all the more because he kept a jealous account of them 
with his conscience. He sauntered along, now throwing a 
cunning and effectual fly, now resting, smoking and chatter¬ 
ing, as the fancy took him. He found a great deal of the old 
stimulus and piquancy in Langham’s society, but there was an 
occasional irritability in his companion, especially toward him¬ 
self personally, which puzzled him. After a while, indeed, he 
began to feel himself the unreasonably cheerful person which 
he evidently appeared to his companion. A mere ignorant 
enthusiast, banished forever from the realm of pure knowledo-e 
by certain original and incorrigible defects—after a few hours’ 
talk with Langham Robert’s quick insight always showed 
him some image of himself resembling this in his friend’s 
mind. 

At last he turned restive. He had been describing to 
Langham his acquaintance with the Dissenting ministm’ of 
the place—a strong, coarse-grained fellow of sensuous, excita¬ 
ble temperament, famous for his noisy “ conversion meetings,” 
and for a gymnastic dexterity in the quoting and combining 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


233 


of texts, unrivaled in Robert’s experience. Some remark on 
the Dissenter’s logic, made, perhaps, a little too much in the 
tone of the churchman conscious of university advantages, 
seemed to irritate Langhani. 

“ You think your Anglican logic in dealing with the Bible so 
superior ! On the contrary, I am all for your Ranter. He is 
your logical Protestant. Historically, you Anglican parsons 
are where you are and what you are, because Englishmen, as 
a whole, like attempting the contradictory—like, above all, to 
eat their ^ake and have it. The nation has made you and 
maintains you for its own purposes. But that is another 
matter.” 

Robert smoked on a moment in silence. Then he flushed 
and laid down his pipe. 

“ We are all fools in your eyes, I know ! A la honyie heiire / 
I have been to the university, and talk what he is pleased to 
call ‘philosophy ’—therefore Mr. Colson denies me faith. You 
have always, in your heart of hearts, denied me knowledge. 
But I cling to both in spite of you.” 

There was a ray of defiance, of emotion, in his look. Lang- 
ham met it in silence. 

“ I deny you nothing,” he said at last, slowly. “ On the 
contrary, I believe you to be the possessor of all that is best 
worth having in life and mind.” 

His irritation had all died away. His tone was one of inde¬ 
scribable depression, and his great black eyes were fixed on 
Robert with a melancholy which startled his companion. By 
a subtle transition Elsmere felt himself touched with a pang of 
profound pity for the man who an instant before had seemed 
to pose as his scornful superior. He stretched out his hand, 
and laid it on his friend’s shoulder. 

Rose spent the afternoon in helping Catherine with various 
parochial occupations. In the course of them Catherine asked 
many questions about Long Whindale. Her thoughts clung 
to the hills, to the gray farm-houses, the rough men and wom¬ 
en inside them. But Rose gave her small satisfaction. 

“ Poor old Jim Backhouse ! ” said Catherine, sighing. 
“ Agnes tells me he is quite bedridden now.” 

\ “ Well,'and a good thing for John, don’t you think,” said 

;Rose briskly, covering a parish library book the while in a 
way which made Catherine’s fingers itch to take it from her, 
“ and for us ? It’s some use having a carrier now.” 

Catherine made no reply. She thought of the “ noodle ” 
fading out of life in the room where Mary Backhouse died; 


234 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


she actually saw the white hair, the blurred eyes, the palsied 
hands, the poor emaciated limbs stretched along the settle. 
Her lieart rose, but she said nothing. 

“And has Mrs. Thornburgh been enjoying her summer?” 

“ Oh ! I suppose so,” said Rose, her tone indicating a quite 
measureless indifference. “ She had another young Oxford 
man staying with her in June—a missionary—and it annoyed 
her very much that neither Agnes nor I would intervene to 
prevent his resuming his profession. She seemed to tliink it 
was a question of saving him from being eaten, and appar¬ 
ently he would have proposed to either of us.” 

Catherine could not help laughing. “ I suppose she still 
thinks she married Robert and me.” 

“ Of course. So she did.” 

Catherine colored a little, but Rose’s hard lightness of tone 
was unconquerable. 

“ Or if she didn’t,” Rose resumed, “ nobody could have the 
heart to rob her of the'illusion. “Oh, by the way, Sarah has 
been under warning since June ! Mrs. Thornburgh told lier 
desperately that she must either throw over her young man, 
who was picked up drunk at the vicarage gate one night, or 
vacate the vicarage kitchen. Sarah cheerfully accepted her 
month’s notice, and is still making the vicarage jams and 
walking out with the young man every Sunday. Mrs. Thorn- 
sees that it will require a convulsion of nature to get rid 
either of Sarah or the young man, and has succumbed. 

“ And the Tysons ? And that poor Walker girl ? ” 

“ Oh, dear me, Catherine ! ” said Rose, a strange dispropor¬ 
tionate flash of impatience breaking through. “ Every one 
in Long Whindale is always just where and what they were 
last year. I admit they are born and die, but they do noth¬ 
ing else of a decisive kind.” 

Catherine’s hands worked away for a Avhile, then she laid 
down her book and said, lifting her clear, large eyes on her 
sister : 

“ Was there never a time when you loved the valley. Rose ? ” 

“ Never ! ” cried Rose. 

Then she pushed away her work, and leaning her elbows on 
the table, turned her brilliant face to Catherine. There was 
frank mutiny in it. 

“By the way, Catherine, are you going to prevent mamma 
from letting me go to Berlin for the winter ? ” 

“ And after Berlin, Rose ? ” said Catherine presently, her 
gaze bent upon her work. 

“ After Berlin ? What next ? ” said Rose, recklessly. “ Well, 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


235 


after Berlin I shall try to persuade mamma and Agnes, I 
suppose, to come and back me up in London. We could 
still be some months of the year at Burwood.” 

Now she had said it out. But tliere was something else 
surely goading the girl than mere intolerance of the family 
tradition. The hesitancy, the moral doubt of her conversa¬ 
tion with Langham, seemed to have vanished wholly in a 
kind of acrid self-assertion. 

Catherine felt a shock sweep through her. It was as though 
all the pieties of life, all the sacred assumptions and self-surren- 
ders at the root of it, were shaken, outraged by the girl’s tone. 

“ Do you ever remember,” she said, looking up, while her 
voice trembled, “ what papa wished when he was dying ? ” 

It was her last argument. To Rose she had very seldom 
used it in so many words. Probably it seemed to her too 
strong, too sacred, to be often handled. 

But Rose sprang up, and pacing the little work-room with 
her white wrists locked behind her, she met that argument 
with all the concentrated passion which her youth had for years 
been storing up against it. Catherine sat presently over¬ 
whelmed, bewildered. This language of a proud and tameless 
individuality, this modern gospel of the divine right of self-de- 
velopment—her soul loathed it ! And yet, since that night in 
Marrisdale, there had been anew yearning in her to understand. 

Suddenly, however, Rose stopped, lost her thread. Two 
figures were crossing the lawn, and their shadows were thrown 
far beyond them by the fast-disappearing sun. 

She threw herself down on her chair again with an abrupt: 
“ Do you see they have come back ? We must go and dress.” 
And as slie spoke she was conscious of a new sensation alto- 
getlier—the sensation of the wild creature lassoed on the 
])rairie, of the bird ex,changing in an instant its glorious free¬ 
dom of flight for the pitiless meshes of the net. It was stif¬ 
ling—her whole nature seemed to fight witli it. 

Catherine rose and began to put away the books they had 
been covering. She had said almost nothing in answer to 
Rose’s tirade. When she was ready she came and stood beside 
her sister a moment, her lips trembling. At last she stooped 
and kissed the girl—the kiss of deep, suppressed feeling—and 
went awa}^ Rose made no response. 

Unmusical as she was, Catherine pined for her sister’s music 
that evening. Robert was busy in his study, and the hours 
seemed interminable. After a little difficult talk Langham 
subsided into a book and a corner. But the only words of 
which he was conscious for long were the words of an inner 


236 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


dialogue. I promised to play for her— Go and offer then! 
—Madness ! let me keep away from her. If she asks me, of 
course I will go. She is much too proud, and already she 
thinks me guilty of a rudeness.” 

Then, with a shrug, he would fall to his book again, abomi¬ 
nably conscious, however, all the while of the white figure be¬ 
tween the lamp and the open window, and of the delicate head 
and cheek lighted up against the trees and the soft August 
dark. 

When the time came to go to bed he got their candles for 
the two ladies. Rose just touched his hand with cool fingers. 

“ Good-night, Mr. Langham. You are going in to smoke 
with Robert, I suppose ? ” 

Her bright eyes seemed to look him through. Their mock¬ 
ing hostility seemed to say to him, as plainly as possible : 
“Your purgatory is over—go, smoke and be happy ! ” 

“ I will go and helj) him wind up his sermon,” he said, with 
an attempt at a laugh, and moved away. 

Rose went upstairs, and it seemed to her that a Greek brow, 
and a pair of wavering, melancholy eyes, went before her in 
the darkness, chased along the passages by the light she held. 
She gained her room, and stood by the window, seized again 
by that stifling sense of catastrophe, so strange, so undefined. 
Then she sliook it off with an angry laugh, and went to work 
to see how far her stock of light dresses had suffered by her 
London dissipations. 

CHAPTER XVI. 

The next morning after breakfast the rectory party were in 
the garden—the gentlemen smoking, Catherine and her sister 
strolling arm-in-arm among the flowers. Catherine’s vague 
terrors of the morning before had all .taken to themselves 
wings. It seemed to her that Rose and Mr. Langham had 
hardly spoken to each other since she had seen them walking 
about together. Robert had already made merry over his own 
alarms and hers, and she admitted he was in the right. As to 
her talk with Rose, her deep, meditative nature was slowly 
working upon and digesting it. Meanwhile, she was all ten¬ 
derness to her sister, and there was even a reaction of pity in 
her heart toward the lonely sceptic who had once been so good 
to Robert. 

Robert was just bethinking himself that it was time to go off 
to the school, when tliey were all startled by an unexpected 
visitor—a short old lady, in a rusty black dress and bonnet, 
who entered the drive and stood staring at the rectory party. 


nOBERT ELSMBRE. 


237 


a hand in a black thread glove shading the sun from a 
pair of wrinkled eyes. 

Mrs. Darcy ! ” exclaimed Robert to his wife after a mo¬ 
ment’s perplexity, and they walked quickly to meet her. 

Rose and Langham exchanged a few commonplaces till the 
others joined them, and then for a while the attention of every¬ 
body in the group was held by the squire’s sister. She was 
very small, as thin and light as thistle-down, ill-dressed, and 
as communicative as a babbling child. The face and all the 
features were extraordinarily minute, and, moreover, blanched 
and etherealized by age. She had the elfish look of a little 
withered fairy godmother. And yet through it all it was clear 
that she was a great lady. There were certain poses and gest¬ 
ures about her, which made her thread gloves and rusty skirts 
seem a mere whim and masquerade, adopted, perhaps, deliber¬ 
ately, from a high-bred love of congruity, to suit the country 
lanes. 

She had come to ask them all to dinner at the Hall on the 
following evening, and she either brought or devised on the 
spot the politest messages from the squire to the new rector, 
which pleased the sensitive Robert and silenced for the mo¬ 
ment his various misgivings as to Mr. Wendover’s advent. 
Then she stayed chattering, studying Rose every now and then 
out of her strange little eyes, restless and glancing as a bird’s, 
which took stock also of the garden, of the flower-beds, of 
Elsmere’s lanky frame, and of Elsmere’s handsome friend in 
the background. She w^as most odd when she was grateful, 
and she was grateful for the most unexpected things. She 
thanked Elsmere effusively for coming to live there, “ sacrific¬ 
ing yourself so nobly as to us country folk,” and she thanked 
him, with an appreciative glance at Langham, for having his 
clever friends to stay with him. “The squire will be so 
pleased. My brother, you know, is very clever ; oh, yes, 
frightfully clever ! ” 

And then there was a long sigh, at which Elsmere could 
hardly keep his countenance. 

She thought it particularly considerate of them to have 
been to see the squire’s books. It would make conversation 
so easy when they came to dinner. 

“ Though I don’t know anything about his books. He 
doesn’t like women to talk about books. He says they only 
pretend—even the clever ones. Except, of course, Madame 
de Stael. He can only say she was ugly, and I don’t deny it. 
But I have about used up Madame de Stael,” she added, 
dropping into another sigh as soft and light as a child’s. 


238 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


Robert was charmed with her, and even Lan^liam smiled. 
And as Mrs. Darcy adored “ clever men,” ranking them, as 
the London of her youth had ranked them, only second to 
persons of birth,” she stood among them beaming, becoining 
more and more wliimsical and inconsequent, more and more 
deliciously incalculable, as she expanded. At last she flut¬ 
tered olf, only, however, to come hurrying back, with little, 
short, scudding steps, to implore them all to come to tea with 
her as soon as possible in the garden that was her special 
hobby, and in her last new summer-house. 

“ I build two or three every summer,” she said. ‘‘Kow, 
there are twenty-one ! Roger laughs at me,” and there was 
a momentary bitterness in the little eerie face, but how can 
one live without hobbies? That’s one—then I’ve two more. 
My album—oh, you will all write in my album, won’t you ? 
When I was young—when I was maid of honor ”—and she 
drew herself up slightly—“ everybody had albums. Even 
the dear queen herself ! I remember how she made Monsieur 
Guizot write in it; something quite stupid, after all. Those 
hobbies—the garden and the album—are quite harmless, aren’t 
they ? They hurt nobody, do they ? ” Her voice dropped a 
little, with a pathetic expostulating intonation in it, as of one 
accustomed to be rebuked. 

“ Let me remind you of a saying of Bacon’s,” said Langham, 
studying her, and softened perforce into benevolence. 

‘‘ Yes, yes,” said Mrs. Darcy, in a flutter of curiosity. 

“ God Almighty first planted a garden,” he quoted ; “ and 
indeed, it is the purest of all human pleasures.” 

“Oh, but how delightful! cried Mrs. Darcy, clasping her 
diminutive hands in their thread gloves. “You must write 
that in my alburn, Mr. Langham, that very sentence ; oh, 
how clever of j^ou to remember it ! What it is to be clever 
and have a brain ! But, then—I’ve another hobby—” 

Here, however, she stopped, hung her head and looked de¬ 
pressed. Robert, with a little ripple of laughter, begged her 
to explain. 

“ No,” she said, plaintively, giving a quick, uneasy look at 
him, as though it occurred to her that it might some day be 
his pastoral duty to admonish her. “ No, it’s wrong. I know 
it is—only I can’t help it. Never mind. You’ll know soon.” 

And again she turned away, when, suddenly. Rose attracted 
her attention, and she stretched out a thin, white bird-claw of 
a hand and caught the girl’s arm. 

“ There, won’t be much to amuse you to-morrow, my dear, 
and there ought to be—you’re so pretty j ” Rose blushed 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


239 


furiously aud tried to draw her hand away. No, uo ! don’t 
mind, don’t mind. I didn’t at your age. Well, we’ll do our 
best. But your own party is so charming and she looked 
round the little circle, her gaze stopping specially at Langham 
before it returned to Rose. “ After all, you will amuse each 
other.” 

Was there any malice in the tiny, withered creature? 
Rose, unsympathetic and indifferent as youth commonly is 
when its own affairs absorb it, had stood coldly outside thd 
group which was making much of the squire’s sister. Was it 
so the strange little visitor revenged herself ? 

At any rate Rose was left feeling as if some one had pricked 
her. While Catherine and Elsmere escorted Mrs. Darcy to 
the gate she turned to go in, her head thrown back stag-like, 
her cheek still burning. Why should it be always open to 
the old to annoy the young with impunity ? 

Langham watched her mount the first step or two ; his eye 
traveled up the slim figure so instinct with pride and will— 
and something in him suddenly gave way. It was like a man 
who feels his grip relaxing on some attacking thing he has 
been holding by the throat. 

He followed her hastily. 

“ Must you go in ? And none of us have paid our respects 
yet to those phloxes in the back garden ? ” 

Oh, woman—flighty woman ! An instant before, the girl, 
sore and bruised in every fiber, she only half knew why, was 
thirsting that this man might somehow offer her his neck that 
she might trample on it. lie offers it, and the angry instinct 
wavers, as a man w^avei’s in a wrestling match when his oppo¬ 
nent unexpectedly gives ground. She paused, she turned her 
white throat. His eyes, upturned, met hers. 

“ The phloxes, did you say ? ” she asked, coolly re-descending 
the steps. ‘‘ Then round here, please.” 

She led the way, he followed, conscious of an utter relaxa¬ 
tion of nerve and will which for the moment had something 
intoxicating in it. 

“ There are your phloxes,” she said, stopping before a splen¬ 
did line of plants in full blossom. Her self-respect was whole 
again ; her spirits rose at a bound. “ I don’t know why you ad¬ 
mire them so much. They have no scent, and they are only 
pretty in the lump,” and she broke off a spike of blossom, 
studied it a little disdainfully, and threw it away. 

He stood beside her, the southern glow and life of which it 
Tvas intermittently capable once more lighting up the strange 
face. 


240 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


“ Give me leave to enjoy everything countrified more tlian 
usual,” he said. “ After this morning it will be long before I 
see the true countiy again.” 

He looked, smiling, round on the blue and white brilliance 
of the sky, clear again after a night of rain ; on the sloping 
garden, on the village beyond, on the hedge of sweet peas close 
beside them, with its blossoms 

“ On tiptoe for a flight, 

With wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white.” 

“ Oh ! Oxford is countrified enough,” she said indiflPerently 
moving down the broad grass-path which divided the garden 
into two equal portions. 

“ But I am leaving Oxford, at aiy^ rate for a year,” he said 
quietly. “ I am going to London.” . 

Her delicate eyebrows went up. “ To London ? ” Then 
a tone of mock meekness and sympathy. ‘‘ How you will dis¬ 
like it ! ” 

Dislike it—why ? ” 

Oh ! because ”—she hesitated, and then laughed her daring 
girlish laugh—“ because there are so many stupid people in 
London ; the clever people are not all picked out like prize 
apples, as I suppose they are at Oxford.” 

“ At Oxford ? ” repeated Langham, with a kind of groan. 
“At Oxford ? You imagine that Oxford is inhabited only by 
clever people ? ” 

“ I can only judge by what I see,” she said demurely. “ Ev¬ 
ery Oxford man always behaves as if he were the cream of the 
universe. Oh ! I don’t mean to be rude,” she cried, losing for 
a moment her defiant control over herself, as though afraid of 
having gone too far. “ I am not the least disrespectful, really. 
When you and Robert talk, Catherine and I feel quite as hum¬ 
ble as we ought.” 

The words were hardly out before she could have bitten the 
tongue that spoke them. He had made her feel her indiscre¬ 
tions of Sunday night as she deserved to feel them, and 
now after three minutes’ conversation she was on the verge 
of fresh ones. Would she never grow up, never behave like 
other girls ? That word humble! It seemed to ^^burn her 
memory. 

Before he could possibly answer she barred the way by a 
question as short and dry as possible— 

“ What are you going to London for ? ” 

“ For many reasons,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “ I 
have told no one yet—not even Elsrnere. And indeed I go 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


241 


back to my rooms for a while from here. But as soon as Term 
begins I become a Londoner.” 

They had reached the gate at the bottom of the garden, and 
were leaning against it. She was disturbed, conscious, lightly 
flushed. It struck her as another gaucherie on her part that 
she should have questioned him as to his plans. What did his 
life matter to her ? 

He was looking away from her, studying the half-ruined, de¬ 
graded manor house spread out below them. Then suddenly 
he turned: 

“ If I could imagine for a moment it would interest you to 
hear my reasons for leaving Oxford, I could not flatter myself 
you would see any sense in them. I know that Robert will think 
them moonshine ; nay, more, that they will give him pain.” 

He smiled sadly. The tone of gentleness, the sudden breach 
in the man’s melancholy reserve affected the girl beside him 
for the second time, precisely as they had affected her the first* 
time. The result of twenty-four hours’ resentful meditation 
turned out to be precisely 7iil, Her breath came fast, her 
proud look melted, and his quick sense caught the change in 
an instant. 

“ Are you tired of Oxford ? ” the poor child asked him, al¬ 
most shyly. 

“ Mortally ! ” he said, still smiling. ‘‘And what is more im¬ 
portant still, Oxford is tired of me. “ I have been lecturing 
there for ten years. They have had more than enough of me.” 

“ Oh ! but Robert said—” began Rose impetuously, then 
stopped, crimson, remembering many things Robert had said. 

“ That I helped him over a few stiles ? ” returned Lang- 
ham calmly. “ Yes, there was a time when I was capable of 
that—there was a time when I could teach, and teach with 
pleasure.” He paused. Rose could have scourged herself for 
the tremor she felt creeping over her. Why should it be to 
her so new and strange a thing that a ma7i, especially a man 
of these years and this caliber, should confide in her, should 
speak to her intimately of himself ? After all, she said to 
herself angrily, with a terrified sense of importance, she was a 
child no longer, though her mother and sisters would treat her 
as one. “ When w^e were chatting the other night,” he went 
on, turning to her again as he stood leaning on the gate, “ do 
you know what it was struck me most ? ” 

His tone had in it the most delicate, the most friendly defer¬ 
ence. But Rose flushed furiously. 

“ That girls are very ready to talk about themselves, I im¬ 
agine,” she said scornfully.’ 


242. 


IIOBERT ELSMEHE. 


“ Not at all! Not for a moment ! No, bnt it seemed to 
me so pathetic, so strange that anybody should wish for any¬ 
thing so much as you wished for the musician’s life.” 

“And you never wished for anything ? ” she cried. 

“ When Elsmere was at college,” he said, smiling, “ I be¬ 
lieve I wished he should get a first-class. This year I have 
certainly wished to say good-by to St. Anselm’s, and to turn 
my back for good and all on my men. I can’t remember that 
I have wished for anything else for six years.” 

She looked at him perplexed. Was his manner merely lan¬ 
guid, or was it from him that the emotion she felt invading 
herself first started ? She tried to shake it off. 

“ And I am just a bundle of wants,” she said, half mock¬ 
ingly. “ Generally speaking, I am in the condition of being 
ready to barter all I have for some folly or other—one in the 
morning, another in the afternoon. AVhat have you to say to 
such people, Mr. Langham ? ” 

Her eyes challenged him magnificently, mostly out of sheer 
nervousness. But the face they rested on seemed suddenly to 
turn to stone before her. The life died out of it. It grew 
still and rigid. 

“ Nothing,” he said quietly. “ Between them and me there 
is a great gulf fixed. I watch them pass, and I say to my¬ 
self : ‘There are the living —that is how they look, how they 
speak. Realize once for all that j^ou have nothing to do with 
them. Life is theirs—belongs to them. You are already out¬ 
side it. Go your way, and be a specter among the active and 
the happy no longer.” 

He leaned his back against the gate. Did he see her? Was 
he conscious of her at all in this rare impulse of speech which 
had suddenly overtaken one of the most withdrawn and silent 
of human beings ? All her airs dropped off her ; a kind of 
fright seized her, and involuntarily she laid her hand on 
his arm. 

“Don’t—don’t—Mr. Langham! Oh, don’t say such 
things ! Why should you be so unhappy ? Why should 
you talk so ? Can no one do anything ? Why do "you live 
so much alone ? Is there no one you care about? ” 

He turned. What a vision ! His artistic sense absorbed it 
in an instant—the beautiful tremulous lip, the drawn white 
brow. For a moment he drank in the pity, the emotion, of 
those eyes. Then a movement of such self-scorn as even he 
had never felt swept through him. He gently moved away ; 
her hand dropped. 

“ Miss Leyburn,” he said, gazing at her, his olive face sin- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


24 


guiarly pale, “ don’t waste your pity on me, for heaven’s sake. 
Some madness made me behave as I did just now. Years ago 
the same sort of idiocy betrayed me to your brother ; never 
before or since. I ask your pardon, liumbly,” and his tone 
seemed to scorch her, “ that this second fit of ranting should 
have seized me in your presence.” 

But he could not keep it up. The inner upheaval had gone 
too far. He stopped and looked at her—piteously, the features 
quivering. It was as though the man’s whole nature had for 
the moment broken up, become disorganized. She could not 
bear it. Some ghastly infirmity seemed to have been laid 
barek to her. She held out both her hands. Swiftly he 
caught them, stooped, kissed them, let them go. It was an 
extraordinary scene—to both a kind of life-time. 

Then he gathered himself together by a mighty effort. 

“ That was adorable of you,” he said, with a long breath. 

But I stole it—I despise myself. Why should you pity 
me ? What is there to pity me for ? My troubles, such as 
I have, are my own making—every one.” 

And he laid a sort of vindictive emphasis on the words. 
The tears of excitement were in his eyes. 

“Won’t you let me be your friend ?” she said, trembling, 
with a kind of reproach. “I thought—the other night—we 
were to be friends. Won’t you tell me—” 

“ More of yourself ? ” her eyes said, but her voice failed 
her. And as for him, as he gazed at her, all the accidents of 
circumstance, of individual character, seemed to drop from 
her. He forgot the difference of years ; he saw her no longer 
as she was—a girl hardly out of the school-room, vain, am¬ 
bitious, dangerously responsive, on whose crude, romantic 
sense he was wantonly playing ; she was to him pure beaut}^, 
pure woman. For one tumultuous moment the cold, critical 
instinct which had been for years draining his life of all its 
natural energies was powerless. It was sweet to yield, to 
speak, as it had never been sweet before. 

So, leaning over the gate, he told her the story of his life, 
of his cramped childhood and youth, of his brief moment of 
happiness and success at college, of his first attempts to make 
himself a power among younger men, of the gradual dismal 
failure of all his efforts, tlie dying down of desire and am¬ 
bition. From the general narrative there stood out little 
pictures of individual persons or scenes, clear cut and 
masterly—of his father, the Gainsborough church-warden ; 
of his Methodistical mother, Avho had all her life lamented 
her own beauty as a special snare of Satan, and who since 


244 


ROBERT ELbMERE. 


her husband’s death had refused to see her son on the ground 
that his opinions “had vexed his father”; of his first ardent 
worship of knowledge, and passion to communicate it; and 
of the first intuitions in lecture face to face, with an under¬ 
graduate, alone in college-rooms, sometimes alone on Alpine 
heights, of something cold, impotent, and baflling in himself, 
which was to stand forever between him and action, between 
him and human aifection ; the growth of the critical pessimist 
sense which laid the axe to the root of enthusiasm after en¬ 
thusiasm, friendship after friendship—which made other men 
feel him inhuman, intangible, a skeleton at the feast; and 
the persistence through it all of a kind of hunger for life in 
its satisfactions, which the will was more and more powerless 
to satisfy ; all these Langham put into Avords with an ex¬ 
traordinary magic and delicacy of phrase. There Avas some¬ 
thing in him which found a kind of pleasure in the long analy¬ 
sis, which took pains that it should be infinitely Avell done. 

Rose followed him breathlessly. If she had knoAvn more 
of literature she Avould have realized that she AA^as Avitnessing 
a masterly dissection of one of those many morbid groAvtUs 
of Avhich our nineteenth century psychology is full. But she 
Avas anything but literary, and she could not analyze her ex¬ 
citement. The man’s physical charm, his melancholy, the 
intensity of Avhat he said, affected, unsteadied her as music 
Avas apt to affect her. And through it all there Avas the 
strange girlish pride that this should have befallen her; a 
first crude, intoxicating sense of the power over human lives 
which Avas to be hers, mingled Avith a desperate anxiety to be 
equal to the occasion, to play her })art well. 

“ So you see,” said Langham at last, Avith a great effort (to 
do him justice) to climb back on to some ordinary level of 
conversation, “ all these transcendentalisms apart, I am about 
the most unfit man in the Avorld for a college tutor. The 
undergraduates regard me as a shillj^-shallying pedant. On 
my part,” he added dryly, “ I am not sIoav to retaliate. EA'ery 
term I live I find the young man a less interesting animal. 
I regard the whole university system as a Avretched sham. 
KnoAAdedge ! It has no more to do AAdth knoAvledge than mv 
boots.” 

And for one curious instant he looked out OA^er the village, 
his fastidious scholar’s soul absorbed by some intellectual 
irritation, of Avhich Rose understood absolutely nothing. 
She stood bewildered, silent, longing childishly to speak, to 
influence him, but not knowing Avhat cue to tak^e. 

“ And then—” he went on presently (but was the strange 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


245 


being speaking to her ?)—“ so long as I stay there, Avorrying 
those about me, and cutting my own heart but, I am cut off 
from the only life that might be mine, that I might find the 
strength to live.” 

The words were Ioav and deliberate. After his moment of 
passionate speech, and hers of passionate sympathy, she began 
to feel strangely remote from him. 

Do you mean the life of the student ? ” she asked him 
after a pause, timidly. 

Her voice recalled him. He turned and smiled at her. 

‘‘ Of the dreamer, rather.” 

And as her eyes still questioned, as he Avas still moved by 
the spell of her responsiveness, he let the neAv wave of feel¬ 
ing break in words. Vaguely at first, and then with a grow¬ 
ing flame and force, he fell to describing to her Avhat the life 
of thought may be to the thinker, and those marvelous mo¬ 
ments which belong to that life Avhen the mind has divorced 
itself from desire and sense sees spread out before it the vast 
realms of knowledge, and feels itself close to the secret springs 
and sources of being. And as he spoke, his language took 
an ampler turn, the element of smallness which attaches to all 
mere personal complaint vanished, his Avords floAved, became 
eloquent, inspired, till the bewildered child beside him, Avarm 
through and through as she was Avith youth and passion, felt 
for an instant by sheer fascinated sympathy the cold spell, 
the ineffable prestige, of the thinker’s voluntary death in life. 

But only for an instant. Then the natural sense of chill 
smote her to tl¥i heart. 

‘‘ You make me shiver,” she cried interrupting him. “ Have 
those strange things—I don’t understand them—made you 
happy ? Can they make any one happy ? Oh, no, no ! Hap¬ 
piness is to be got from living, seeing, experiencing, making 
friends, enjoying nature ! Look at the world, Mr. Langham ! ” 
she said, Avitb bright cheeks, half smiling at her own magnilo¬ 
quence, her hand waving over the view before them. “ What 
has it done that you should hate it so? If you can’t put up 
with people you might love nature. I—I can’t be content Avith 
nature, because I want some life first. Up in Whindale there 
is too much nature, not enough life. But if I had got through 
life—if it had disappointed me—then I should love nature. I 
keep saying to the mountains at home : ‘ Not now, not now ; 
I Avant something else, but afterward if I can’t get it, or if I 
get too much of it, Avhy then I Avill love you, live Avith you. You 
are my second string, my reserve. You—and art—and 
poetry. ’ ” 


246 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


“ But everything depends on feeling,” lie said softly, hut 
lightly, as though to keep the conversation from slijipiiig 
back into those vague depths it had emerged from ; “ and it 
one has forgotten how to feel—if when one sees or hears some¬ 
thing beautiful tliat used to stir one, one can only say : ‘I 
remember it moved me once! ’—if feeling dies, like life, like phy¬ 
sical force, but prematurely, long before the rest of the man ? ” 

She gave a long, quivering sigh of passionate antagonism. 

‘‘ Oil, I can not imagine it! ” she cried. “ I shall feel to my 
last hour.” Then, after a pause, in another tone : “But, Mr. 
Langham, you say music excites you, Wagner excites you ? ” 

“ Yes, a sort of strange second life I can still get out of 
music,” he admitted, smiling. 

“ Well, then,” and she looked up at him persuasiveljq “ why 
not give yourself up to music ? It is so easy—so little trouble 
to one’s-self—it just takes you and carries you away.” 

Then, for the hrst time, Langham became conscious—proba¬ 
bly through these admonitions of hers—that the situation had 
absurdity in it. 

“ It is not my metier^'' he said hastily. “ The self that en¬ 
joys music is an outer self, and can only bear with it for a 
short time. No, Miss Leyburn, I shall leave Oxford, the col¬ 
lege will sing a Te Deum, I shall settle down in London, I 
shall keep a big book going, and cheat the years, after all, I 
suppose, as well as most people.” 

“And you will know, you will remember,” she said, falter¬ 
ing, reddening, her womanliness forcing the words out of her, 
“ that you have friends : Robert—my sister—all of us ? ” 

He faced her with a little quick movement. And as their 
eyes met, each was struck once more with the personal beauty 
of the otlier. His eyes shone—their black depths seemed all 
tenderness. 

“ I will never forget this visit, this garden, this hour,” he 
said slowly, and they stood looking at each other. Rose felt 
herself swept off her feet into a world of tragic, m3"sterious 
emotion. She all but put her hand into his again, asking him 
childishly to hope, to be consoled. But the maidenly impulse 
restrained her, and once more he leaned on the gate, burying 
his face in his hands. 

Suddenly he felt himself utterl}^ tired, relaxed. Strong 
nervous reaction set in. Wliat had all this scene, this tragedv, 
been about ? And tlien in another instant was that sense of 
the ridiculous again clamoring to be heard. He—the man 
of tliirtv-five—confessing himself, making a tragic scene, 
playing Manfred or Cain to this adorable, half-fledged crea- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


2i7 


tiire, whom he had known five days ! Supposing Elsmere 
had been there to hear—Elsmere with his sane eye, his laugh ! 
As he leaned over the gate he found himself quivering with 
impatience to be away—by himself—out of reach—the critic 
in him making the most bitter, remorseless mock of all these 
heroics and despairs the other self had been indulging in. But 
for the life of him he could not find a word to say—a move 
to make. He stood hesitating, gauche^ as usual. 

“ Do you know, Mr. Langham,” said Rose lightly, by his side, 
“ that there is no time at all left for yoi(. to give me good 
advice in ? That is an obligation still hanging over you. I 
don’t mean to release you from it, but if I don’t go in now 
and finish the covering of those library books, the youth of 
Murewell will be left without any literature till Heaven 
knows when ! ” 

He could have blessed her for the tone, for the escape into 
common mundanity. 

“ Hang literature—hang the parish library ! ” he said, 
with a laugh as lie moved after her. Yet his real inner feel¬ 
ing toward that parish library was one of infinite friendliness. 

“ Hear these men of letters ! ” she said scornfully. But 
she was happy ; there was a glow on her cheek. 

A bramble cauglit her dress ; she stopped and laid her 
white hand to it, but in vain. He knelt in an instant, and 
between them they wrenched it away, but not till those soft, 
slim fingers had several times felt the neighborhood of his 
brown ones, and till there had flown through and through 
him once more, as she stooped over him, the consciousness 
that she was young, that she was beautiful, that she had 
pitied liim so sweetly, that they were alone. 

“ Rose ! ” 

It was Catherine calling—Catherine, who stood at the end 
of the grass-path, with eyes all indignation and alarm. 

Langham rose quickly from the ground. 

He felt as though the gods had saved him—or damned 
him—which ? 

CHAPTER XVH. 

Murewell Rectory during the next forty-eight hours was 
the scene of much that might have been of interest to a psy- 
cliologist gifted with the power of divining his neighbors. 

In the first place Catherine’s terrors were all alive again. 
Robert had never seen her so moved since those days of storm 
and stress before theii* engagement. 

“ I can not bear it! ” she said to Robert at night in their 


248 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


room. “ I can not bear it ! I hear it always in my ears : 
‘ What hast thou done with thy sister ? ’ Oh, Robert, don’t 
mind, dear, though he is your friend. My father would have 
shrunk from him with horror. Aii alien from the household 
of faith! An eyiemy to the Cross of Christ 

She flung out the words with low, intense emphasis and 
frowning brow, standing rigid by the window, her hands 
locked behind her. Robert stood by her, much perplexed, feel¬ 
ing himself a good deal of a culprit, but inwardly conscious 
that he knew a great deal more about Langham than she did. 

My dear wife,” he said to her, “ I am certain Langham 
has no intention of marrying.’ 

“ Then more shame for him ! ” cried Catherine, flushing. 
‘‘ They could not have looked more conscious, Robert, when I 
found them together, if he had just proposed.” 

“ What, in flve days ? ” said Robert, more than half inclined 
to banter his wife. Then he fell into meditation as Catherine 
made no answer. “ I believe with men of that sort,” he said 
at last, “ relations to women are never more than half real— 
always more or less literature—acting. Langham is tasting 
an experience, to be bottled up for future use.” 

It need hardly be said, however, that Catherine got small 
consolation out of this point of view. It seemed to her Robert 
did not take the matter quite rightly. 

“ After all, darling,” he said at last, kissing her, “ you can 
act dragon splendidly ; “ you have already—so can I. And 
3^ou really can not make me believe in anything very tragic in 
a week.” 

But Catherine was conscious that she had already played 
the dragon hard, to very little purpose. In the forty hours 
that intervened between the scene in the garden and the 
squire’s dinner-party, Robert was always wanting to carry off 
Langham, Catherine was always asking Rose’s help in some 
household business or other. In vain. Langham said to 
himself, calmly this time, that Rlsmere and his wife were 
making a foolish mistake in supposing that his friendship 
with Miss Leyburn was anything to be alarmed about, that 
they would soon be amply convinced of it themselves, and 
meanwhile he should take his own way. And as for Rose, 
they had no sooner turned back all three from the house to 
the garden than she had divined everything in Catherine’s 
mind, and set herself against her sister with a willful force in 
which many a past irritation found expression. 

LIow Catherine hated the music of that week ! It seemed to 
her she never opened the drawing-room door but she saw 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


249 


Lano'liam at tlie piano, liis liead with its crown of glossy, curling- 
black hair, and his eyes lighted with unwonted gleams of 
laughter and sympathy, turned toward Rose, who was either 
chatting wildly to him, mimicking the airs of some professional, 
or taking olf the ways of some famous teacher ; or else, which 
was worse, playing wdth all her soul, flooding the house with 
sound—now as soft and delicate as first love, now as full and 
grand as storm waves on an angry coast. And the sister, go¬ 
ing with compressed lip to her work-table, would recognize 
sorely that never had the girl looked so handsome, and never had 
the lightnings of a wayward genius played so finely about her. 

As to Langham, it may well be believed that after the scene 
in the garden he had rated, satirized, examined himself in the 
most approved introspective style. One half of him declared 
that scene to have been the heights of melodramatic absurdity; 
the other thought of it Avith a thrill of tender gratitude 
toAvard the young pitiful creature Avho had evoked it. After 
all, Avhy, because he was alone in thcAA^orld and must remain so, 
should he feel bound to refuse this one gift of the gods, the 
delicate passing gift of a girl’s—a child’s friendship ? As for 
her, the man’s very real, though whollv morbid, modesty, 
scouted the notion of love on her side. He Avas a likely per¬ 
son for a beauty on the threshold of life and success to fall in 
love Avith ; but she meant to be kind to him, and he smiled a 
little inward indulgent smile over her very evident compas¬ 
sion, her very evident intention of reforming him, reconciling 
him to life. And, finally, he was incapable of any further re¬ 
sistance. He had gone too far Avith her. Let her do what she 
would Avith him, dear child, Avith the sharp tongue and the soft 
heart, and the touch of genius and brilliancy Avdiich made her 
future so interesting ! He called his age and his disillusions 
to the rescue ; he posed to himself as stooping to her in some 
sort of elder-brotherly fashion ; and if every now and then 
some disturbing memory of that strange scene between them 
would come to make his present role less plausible, or some 
whim of hers made it difficult to play, Avhy then at bottom 
there Avas always the consciousness that sixty hours, or there¬ 
abouts, Avould see him safely settled in that morning train to 
London. Throughout it is probable that that morning train 
occupied the saving background of his thoughts. 

The two daj^s passed by, and the squire’s dinner-party ar¬ 
rived. About seven on the Thursday evening a party of four 
might have been seen hurrying across the park—Langham and 
Catherine in front, Elsmere and Rose behind. Catherine had 
arranged it so, and Langham, Avho understood perfectly that 


250 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


his frieiulsliip with lier younger sister was not at all to Mrs. 
Elsmere’s taste, and who had by now taken as much of a dis¬ 
like to her as his nature 'was capable of, w'as certainly doing 
nothing to make his walk with her otherwise than difficult. 
And every now and then some languid epigram would bring 
Catherine’s e3^es on him with a fiery gleam in their gray 
depths. Oh, fourteen more hours and she would have shut the 
rectory gate on this most unwelcome of intruders ! She had 
never felt so vindictively anxious to see the last of any one in 
her life. There was in her a vehemence of antagonism to the 
man’s manner, his pessimism, his infidelity, his very ways of 
speaking and looking, which astonished even herself. 

Robert’s eager soul meanwhile, for once irresponsive to 
Catherine’s, was full of nothing but the squire. At last the 
moment was come, and that dumb spiritual friendship he had 
formed through these long months with the philosopher and the 
savant was to be tested by sight and speech of the man. He 
bade himself a hundred times pitch his expectations low. 
But curiosity and hope were keen, in spite of everything. 

Ah, those parish worries ! Robert caught the smoke of 
Mile End in the distance, curling above the twilight woods, * 
and laid about him vigorously with his stick on the squire’s 
shrubs, as he thought of those poisonous hovels, those ruined 
lives ! But, after all, it might be mere ignorance, and that 
wretch Henslowe might have been merely trading on his mas¬ 
ter’s morbid love of solitude. 

And then—all men have their natural conceits. Robert 
Elsmere would not have been the very human creature, he 
was if, half consciously, he had not counted a good deal on 
his own powers of influence. Life had been to him so far one 
long social success of the best kind. Very likel}^, as he 
walked on to the great house over whose threshold laj^ the ans- 
Aver to the enigma of months, his mind gradually filled Avith 
some naiA^e young dream of Avinning the squire, playing with him 
all sorts of honest arts, beguiling him back to life—to his kind. 

Those friendly messages of his through Mrs. Darcy had 
been very pleasant. 

“ I wonder Avhether my Oxford friends have been doing me 
a good turn with the squire,” he said to Rose, laughing. ‘‘ He 
knows the provost, of course. If they talked me over it is to 
be hoped my scholarship didn’t come up. Precious little the 
provost used to think of m^'- abilities for Greek prose ! ” 

Rose yawiied a little behind her gloved hand. Robert had 
already talked a good deal about the squire, and he Avas 
certainly the only person in the group who Avas thinking of him. 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


251 


Even Catherine, absorbed in other anxieties, had forgotten to 
feel any thrill at their approaching introduction to tlie man 
who must of necessity mean so mucli to herself and Robert. 

“ Mr. and Mrs. Robert Elsmere,” said the butler, throwing 
open the carved and gilded doors. 

Catherine—following her husband, her fine, grave head and 
beautiful neck held a little more erect than usual—was at first 
conscious of nothing but the dazzle ofwestern light which flood¬ 
ed the room, striking the stands of Japanese lilies, and the white 
figure of a clown in the famous Watteau opposite the wkidow. 

Then she found herself greeted by Mrs. Darcy, whose odd 
habit of holding her lace handkerchief in her right hand on 
festive occasions only left her two fingers for her guests. The 
mistress of the Hall—as diminutive and elf-like as ever in 
spite of the added dignity of her sweeping silk and the dra¬ 
peries of black lace with which her tiny head adorned—kept 
tight hold of Catherine, and called a gentleman standing in a 
group just behind her. 

“ Roger, here are Mr. and Mrs. Robert Elsmere. Mr. Els¬ 
mere, the squire remembers you in petticoats, and I’m not sure 
that I don’t too.” 

Robert, smiling, looked beyond her to the advancing figure 
of the squire, but if Mr. Wendover heard his sister’s remark 
he took no notice of it. Hs held out his hand stiffly to Robert, 
bowed to Catherine and Rose before extending to them the 
same formal greeting, and jnst recognized Langham as having 
met him at Oxford. 

Having done so he turned back to the knot of people with 
whom he had been engaged on their entrance. His manner 
had been reserve itself. The hauteur of the grandee on his 
own ground was clearly marked in it, and Robert could not 
help fancying that toward himself there had been even some¬ 
thing more. And not one of those phrases which, under the 
circumstances, would have been so easy and so gracious, as to 
Robert’s childish connection with the place, or as to the 
squire’s remembrance of his father, even though Mrs. Darcy 
had given him a special opening of the kind. 

The young rector instinctively drew himself together, like 
one who has received a blow, as he moved across to the other 
side of the fire-place to shake hands with the worthy family 
doctor, old Meyrick, who was already well known to him. 
Catherine, in some discomfort, for she too had felt their recep¬ 
tion at the squire’s hands to be a chilling one, sat down to 
talk to Mrs. Darcy, disagreeably conscious the while that Rose 


252 


BOBEBT ELSMEBE. 


and Langham left to tlicinselves were practically tete-d-tete, 
and that, moreover, a large stand of flowers formed a partial 
screen between her and them. She could see, however, the 
gleam of Rose’s iipstretched neck, as Langham, who was lean¬ 
ing on the piano beside her, bent down to talk to her ; and 
when she looked next she caught a smiling motion of Lang- 
ham’s head and eyes toward the Romney portrait of Mr. Wen- 
dover’s grandmother, and was certain, when he stooped after¬ 
ward to say something to his companion, that he was comment¬ 
ing on a certain surface likeness there was between her and the 
young auburn-haired beauty of the picture. Hateful ! And 
they would be sent down to dinner together to a certainty. 

The other guests were Lady Charlotte Wynnstay, a cousin 
of the squire—a tall, imperious, loud-voiced woman, famous 
in London society for her relationships, her audacity, and the 
salon which in one way or another she managed to collect 
round her ; her dark, thin, irritable-looking husband ; two 
neighboring clerics—the first, by name Longstaife, a somewhat 
inferior specimen of the cloth, Avhom Robert cordially dis¬ 
liked ; and the other, Mr. Bickerton, a gentle Evangelical, 
one of those men who help to ease the harshness of a cross- 
grained world, and to reconcile the cleverer or more impatient 
folk in it to the Avorries of living. 

Lady Charlotte Avas already knoAvn by name to the Elsmeres 
as the aunt of one or their chief friends of the neighborhood— 
the AAofe of a neighboring squire AAdiose property joined that 
of MureAvell Hall, one Lady Helen Varle}^ of Avhom more pre¬ 
sently. Lady Charlotte Avas the sister of the Duke of Sedbergh, 
one of the greatest of dukes, and the sister also of Lady Helen’s 
mother. Lady Wanless. Lady Wanlesshad died prematurely, 
•and her tAVO younger children, Helen and Hugh Flaxman, 
m*eatures both of them of unusually fine and fiery quality, had 
>OAved a good deal to their aunt. There Avere family alliances 
between the Sedberghs and the Wendovers, and Lady Charlotte 
made a point of keeping up Avith the squire. She adored 
cynics and people Avho said piquant things, and it amused her 
to make her large tyrannous hand felt by the squire’s timid, 
<crack-brained, ridiculous little sister. 

As to Dr. Meyrick, he Avas tall and gaunt as Don Quixote. 
His gray hair made a ragged fringe round his straight-backed 
bead; he Avore an old-fashioned neck-cloth; his long body had 
:a perpetual stoop, as though of deference, and his spectacled 
look of mild attentiveness had nothing in common with that 
medical self-assurance Avitli Avhich Ave are all noAvadays so 
familiar. Robert noticed presently that Avhen he addressed 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


258 


Mrs. Darcy lie said ‘‘ ma’am,” making no bones at all about it; 
and his manner generally was the manner of one to whom class 
distinctions were the profoundest reality, and no burden at all 
on a naturally humble temper. Dr. Baker, of Whindale, ac¬ 
customed to trouncing Mrs. Seaton, would have thought him 
a poor creature. 

When dinner was announced, Robert found himself assigned 
to Mrs. Darcy; the squire took Lady Charlotte. Catherine 
fell to Mr. Bickerton, Rose to Mr. Wynnstay, and the rest 
found their way in as best they could. Catherine, seeing the 
distribution, was happy for a moment, till she found that if 
Rose was covered on her right she was exposed to the full fire 
of the enemy on her left ; in other words, that Langham was 
placed between her and Dr. Meyrick. 

“ Are your spirits damped at all by this magnificence ? ” 
Langham said to his neighbor as they sat down. The table 
was entirely covered with Japanese lilies, save for the splendid 
silver candelabra from which the light flashed, first on to the 
faces of the guests, and then on to those of the family portraits, 
hung thickly round the room. A roof embossed with gilded 
Tudor roses on a ground of black oak hung above them; a rose¬ 
water dish in which the Merry Monarch had once dipped his 
hands, and which bore a record of the fact in the inscription on 
its sides, stood before them; and the servants were distribut¬ 
ing to each guest silver soup-plates which had been the gift of 
Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, in some moment of generosity 
or calculation, to the Wendover of her day. 

‘‘ Oh, dear, no! ” said Rose carelessly. “ I don’t know how 
it is, I think I must have been born for a palace.” 

Langham looked at her, at the daring harmony of color made 
by the reddish gold of her hair, the warm whiteness of her skin, 
and the brown-pink tints of her dress, at the crystals playing 
the part of diamonds on her beautiful neck, and remembered 
Robert’s remarks to him. The same irony mingled with the 
same bitterness returned to “him, and the elder brother’s atti¬ 
tude became once more temporarily difficult. “ Who is your 
neighbor ? ” he inquired of her presently. 

“ Lady Charlotte’s husband,” she answered mischievously,, 
under her breath. “ One needn’t know much more about him, 
I imagine.” 

“ And that man opposite ? ” 

“ Robert’s pet aversion,” she said calmly, without a change 
of countenance, so that Mr.Longstaffe opposite, who was study¬ 
ing her as he always studied pretty young women, stared at her 
tlirough her remark in sublime ignorance of its bearing. 


254 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


“ And your sister’s neighbor ? ” 

“ I can’t hit him olf in a sentence, he’s too good! ” said Rose, 
laughing; “ all I can say is that Mrs. Bickerton has too many 
children, and the children have too many ailments, for her ever 
to dine out.” 

“ That will do ; I see the existence,” said Langham, with a 
shrug. “ But he has the look of an apostle, though a rather 
hunted one. Probably nobody here, except Robert, is fit to tie 
his shoes.” 

“ The squire could hardly be called empresse,"^' said Rose, 
after a second, with a curl of her red lips. Mr. Wynnstay was 
still safely engaged with Mrs. Darcy, and there was a buzz of 
talk, largely sustained by Lady Charlotte. 

“ No,” Langham admitted; “the manners I thought were 
not quite equal to the house.” 

“ What possible reason could he have for treating Robert 
with those airs ? ” said Rose indignantly, ready enough in girl 
fashion to defend her belongings against the outer world. “ He 
ought to be only too glad to have the opportunity of knowing 
him and making friends with him.” 

“ You are a sister worth having,” and Langham smiled at 
her as she leaned back in her chair, her white arms and wrists 
lying on her lap, and her slightly flushed face turned toward 
him. They had been on these pleasant terms of camaraderie 
all day, and the intimacy between them had been still making 
strides. 

“ Do you imagine I don’t appreciate Robert because I make 
bad jokes about the choir and the clothing club ? ” she asked 
him, with a little quick repentance passing like a shadow 
through her eyes. “ I always feel I play an odious part here. 
I can’t like it—I can’t—their life. I should hate it ! And 
yet—” ^ 

’ She sighed remorsefully, and Langham, who five minutes 
before could have wished her to be always smiling, could now 
have almost asked to fix her as she was ; the e3'^es veiled, the 
soft lips relaxed in this passing instant of gravity. 

“ Ah ! I forgot,”—and she looked up again with light, be¬ 
witching appeal—“ there is still that question, my poor little 
question of Sunday night, when I was in that fine moral frame 
of mind and you were near giving me, I believe, the only good 
advice you ever gave in your life—how shamefully you have 
treated it.” 

One brilliant look, which Catherine for her torment caught 
from the other side of the table, and then in an instant the 
quick face changed and stilfened. Mr. W^mnstav was speak- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


255 


ing to her, and Langham was left to the intermittent mercies of 
Dr. Meyrick, who though glad to talk, was also quite content, 
apparently, to judge from the radiant placidity of his look, 
to examine his wine, study his menu, and enjoy his en¬ 
trees in silence, undisturbed by the uncertain pleasures of 
conversation. 

Robert, meanwhile, during the first few minutes, in which 
Mr. Wynnstay had been engaged in some family talk with 
Mrs. Darcy, had been allowing himself a little deliberate study 
of Mr. Wendover across what seemed the safe distance of a 
long table. The squire was talking shortly, and abruptly, yet 
with Occasional flashes of shrill, ungainly laughter, to Lady 
Charlotte, who seemed to have no sort oLfear of him and to 
find him good company, and every now and then Robert saw 
him turn to Catherine, on the other side of him, and with an 
obvious change of manner address some formal and constrained 
remark to her. 

Mr. Wendover was a man of middle height and loose, bony 
frame, of which, as Robert had noticed in the drawing-room, 
all the lower half had a thin and shrunken look. But the 
shoulders, which had the scholar’s stoop, and the head were 
massive and squarely outlined. The head was specially re¬ 
markable for its great breadth and comparative flatness above 
the eyes, and for the way in which the head itself dwarfed 
the face, which, as contrasted with the large angularit}^ of the 
skull, had a pinched and drawn look. The hair was reddish- 
gray, the eyes small, but deep set under fine brows, and the 
thin-lipped, wrinkled mouth and long chin had a look of hard, 
sarcastic strength. 

Generally the countenance was that of an old man; the fur¬ 
rows were deep, the skin brown and shriveled. But the alert¬ 
ness and force of the man’s whole expression showed that, if 
the body was beginning to fail, the mind was as fresh and 
masterful as ever. Ilis hair, worn rather longer than usual, 
his loosely fitting dress and slouching carriage gave him an 
un-English look. In general he impressed Robert as a sort of 
curious combination of the foreign savant with the English 
grandee, for while his manner showed a considerable conscious¬ 
ness of birth and social importance, the gulf between him and 
the ordinary English country gentleman could hardly have 
been greater, whether in points of appearance, or, as Robert 
very well knew, in points of social conduct. And as Robert 
watched him, his thoughts flew back again to the library, to 
this man’s past, to all that those eyes had seen and those hands 
had touched. He felt already a mysterious, almost a yearning. 


256 


liOBKRT ELSMERE. 


sense of acquaintance with the being who had just received 
him with such chilling, such unexpected indifference. 

The squire’s manners, no doubt, were notorious, but even so, 
his reception of the new rector of the parish, the son of a man 
intimately connected for years with the place, and with his fa¬ 
ther, and to whom he had himself shown what was for him con¬ 
siderable civility by letter and message, was sufficiently start¬ 
ling. Robert, however, had no time to speculate on the causes 
of it, for Mrs. Darcy, released from Mr. Wynnstay, threw her¬ 
self with glee on to her longed-for prey, the young and inter¬ 
esting-looking rector. First of all she cross-examined him as 
to his literary employments, and when by dint of much ques¬ 
tioning she had foroed particulars from him, Robert’s mouth 
twitched as he watched her scuttling away h’om the subject, 
seized evidently with internal terrors lest she should have 
precipitated herself beyond hope of rescue into the jaws of the 
sixth century. Then, with a view to regaining the lead and 
opening another and more promising vein, she asked him his 
opinion of Lady Selden’s last novel, “Love in a Marsh,” and 
when he confessed ignorance she paused a moment, fork in 
hand, her small, wrinkled face looking almost as bewildered 
as when, three minutes before, her rashness had well-nigh 
brought her face to face with Gregory of Tours as a topic of 
conversation. 

But she was not daunted long. With little airs and brid- 
lings infinitely diverting, she exchanged inquiry for the most 
beguiling confidence. She could appreciate “ clever men,” 
she said, for she—she, too—was literaiy. Did Mr. Elsmere 
know—this in a hurried whisper, with sidelong glances to see 
that Mr. Wynnstay was safely occupied with Rose, and the 
squire with Lady Charlotte—that she had once icrittena novel? 
Robert, who had been posted up in many things concerning 
the neighborhood by Lady Helen Varley, could answer most 
truly that he did. Whereupon Mrs. Darcy beamed all over. 

“Ah but you haven’t read it,” she said, regretfully. “It 
was when I was maid of honor, you know. No maid of honor 
had ever written a novel before. It was quite an event. 
Dear Prince Albert borrowed a copy of me one night to read 
in bed—I have it still, with the page turned down where he 
left off.” She hesitated. “ It was only in the second chap¬ 
ter,” she said at last, with a fine truthfulness, “ but you know 
he was so busy, all the queen’s work to do, of course, besides 
his own—poor man ! ” 

Robert implored her to lend him the work, and Mrs. Darcy, 
with blushes which made her more weird than ever, consented. 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


257 


Then there was a pause, filled by an acid altercation between 
Lady Charlotte and her husband, who had not found Rose as 
grateful for his attentions as, in his opinion, a pink and white 
nobody at a country dinner-party ought to be, and was glad 
of the diversion afforded him by some aggressive remark oT 
wife. He and she differed on three main points—politics ; 
the decoration of their London house, Mr. Wynnstay being a 
lover of Louise Quinze, and Lady Charlotte a preacher of 
Morris ; and the composition of their dinner-parties. Lady 
Charlotte, in the of amusement and notoriety, was 

fond of flooding the domestic hearth with all the people pos¬ 
sessed of any sort of a name for any sort of a reason in London. 
Mr. Wynnstay loathed such promiscuity ; and the company 
in which his wife compelled him to drink his wine had seri¬ 
ously soured a small, irritable Conservative with more family 
pride than either nerves or digestion. 

During the whole passage of arms Mrs. Darcy watched Els- 
mere, cat-and-mouse fashion, with a further confidence burn¬ 
ing within her, and as soon as there was once more a general 
burst of talk, she pounced upon him afresh. Would he like 
to know that after thirty years she had just finished her second 
novel, unbeknown to her brother—as she mentioned him the 
little face darkened, took a strange bitterness—and it was just 
about to be inti'usted to the post and a publisher ? 

Robert was all interest, of course, and inquired the subject. 
Mrs. Darcy expanded still more—could, in fact, have hugged 
him. But, just as she was launching into the plot, a thought, 
apparently a scruple of conscience, struck her. 

“ Do you remember,” she began, looking at him a little dark¬ 
ly askance, “what I said about my hobbies the other day? 
Now, Mr. Elsmere, will you tell me—don’t mind me—don’t 
be polite—have you ever heard people tell stories of me ? Have 
you ever, for instance, heard them call me a—a—tuft-hunter ? ” 

“ Never ! ” said Robert heartily. 

“ They might,” she said, sighing. “I am a tuft-hunter. I 
can’t help it. And yet we are a good family, you know. I 
suppose it was that year at court, and that horrid Warham 
afterward. Twenty years in a cathedral town—and a very 
little cathedral town, after Windsor, and Buckingham Palace, 
and dear Lord Melbourne ! Every year I came up to town to 
stay with my father for a month in the season, and if it hadn’t 
been for that I should have died—my husband knew I should. 
It was the world, the flesh, and the devil, of course, but it 
couldn’t be helped. But now,” and she looked plaintively at 
her companion, as though challenging him to a candid reply, 


258 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


you loould be more interesting, wouldn’t you, to tell the 
truth, if you had a handle to your name ?” 

‘‘ Immeasurably,” cried Robert, stifling his laughter with 
immense difficulty, as lie saw she had no inclination to laugh. 

“ Well, yes, you know. But it isn’t right and again she 
sighed. “ And so I have been writing this novel just for 
that. It is called—what do you think?—‘Mr. Jones.’ Mr. 
Jones is my hero—it’s so good for me, you know, to think 
about a Mr. Jones.” 

She looked beamingly at him. “ It must be, indeed ! Have 
you endowed him with every virtue?” 

“ Oh, yes, and in the end, you know—” and she bent for¬ 
ward eagerly—“ it all comes right. His father didn’t die in 
Brazil without children, after all, and the title—” 

“ What!” cried Robert, “ so he wasti't Mr. Jones ?” 

Mrs. Darcy looked a little conscious. 

“ Well, no,” she said guiltily, “ not just at the end. But it 
really doesn’t matter—not to the story.” 

Robert shook his head, with a look of protest as admonitory 
as he could make it, which evoked in her an answering ex¬ 
pression of anxiety. But just at that moment a loud wave 
of conversation and of laughter seemed to sweep down upon 
them from the other end of the table, and their little private 
eddy was effaced. The squire had been telling an anecdote, 
and his clerical neighbors had been laughing at it. 

“ Ah ! ” cried Mr. Longstaffe, throwing himself back in his 
chair with a chuckle, “ that was an archbishop worth having ! ” 

“ A curious story,” said Mr. Bickerton benevolently, the 
point of it, however, to tell the truth, not being altogether 
clear to him. It seemed to Robert that the squire’s keen eye, 
as he sat looking down the table, with his large nervous hands 
clasped before him, was specially fixed upon himself. 

“ May we hear the story ? ” he said, bending forward. 
Catherine, faintly smiling in her corner beside the host, was 
looking a little flushed and moved out of her ordinary quiet. 

“It is a story of Archbishop Manners Sutton,” said Mr. 
Wendover, in his dry; nasal voice. You probably know it, 
Mr. Elsmere. After Bishop Heber’s consecration to the See 
of Calcutta, it fell to the archbishop to make a valedictory 
speech, in the course of the luncheon at Lambert which 
followed the ceremony. ‘ I have very little advice to give 
you as to your future career,’ he said to the young bishop, 
‘ but all that experience has given me I hand on to you. 
Place before your eyes two precepts, and two onlj^ One is. 
Preach the Gospel : and the other is. Put down enthusiasm ! ’ ” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


259 


There was a sudden gleam of steely animation in the 
squire’s look as he told his story, his eye all the while fixed on 
Robert. Robert divined in a moment that the story had 
been retold for his special benefit, and that in some unex¬ 
plained way the relations between liiin and the squire were 
already biassed. He smiled a little with faint politeness, and 
falling back into his place made no comment on the squire’s 
anecdote. Lady Charlotte’s eyeglass, having adjusted itself 
for a moment to the distant figure of the rector, with regard 
to whom she had been asking Dr. Meyrick for particulars, 
quite unmindful of Catherine’s neighborhood, turned back 
again toward the squire. 

‘‘ An unblushing old worldling, I should call your arch¬ 
bishop,” she said briskly. “ And a very good thing for him 
that he lived Avhen he did. Our modern good people would 
have dusted his apron for him.” 

Lady Charlotte prided herself on these vigorous forms of 
speech, and the squire’s neighborhood generally called out an 
unusual crop of them. The squire was still sitting with his 
hands on the table, his great brows bent, surveying his guests. 

Oh, of course all the sensible men are dead ! ” he said 
indifferently. “ But that is a pet saying of mine—the Church 
of England in a nutshell.” 

Robert flushed, and after a moment’s hesitation bent forward. 

‘‘ What do you suppose,” he asked quietly, “ your arch¬ 
bishop meant, Mr. Wendover, by enthusiasm ? Nonconform¬ 
ity, I imagine.” 

Oh, very possibly ! ” and again Robert found the hawk¬ 
like glance concentrated on himself. “ But I like to give his 
remark a much wider extension. One may make it a maxim 
of general experience, and take it as fitting all the fools with 
a mission who have teased our generation—all your Kings¬ 
leys, and Maurices, and Ruskins—every one bent upon 
making any sort of aimless commotion which may serve him 
both as an investment for the next world and an advertise¬ 
ment for this.” 

“ Upon my word, squire,” said Lady Charlotte, hope you 
don’t expect Mr. Elsmere to agree with you ? ” 

Mr. Wendover made her a little bow. 

“ I have very little sanguineness of any sort in my composi¬ 
tion,” he said dryly. 

‘‘ I should like to know,” said Robert, taking no notice of 
this by-play—“I should like to know, Mr. Wendover, leaving 
tlie archbishop out of count, what yo^l understand by this 
word enthusiasm in this maxim of yours ? ” 


260 


ROBEUT ELSMERE. 


“ An excellent manner,” thought Lady Charlotte, who, for 
all her noisiness, was an extremely shrewd woman, “ an excel¬ 
lent manner and an unprovoked attack.” 

Catherine’s trained eye, however, had detected signs in 
Robert’s look and bearing which were lost on Lady Charlotte, 
and which made her look nervously on. As to the rest of the 
table, they had all fallen to watching the “ break ” between 
the new rector and their host with a good deal of curiosity. 

The squire paused a moment before replying : 

“ It is not easy to put it tersely,” he said at last ; ‘‘ but I 
may define it, perhaps, as the mania for mending the roof of 
your right-hand neighbor with straw torn off the roof of your 
left-hand neighbor ; the custom, in short, of robbing Peter to 
propitiate Paul.” 

“ Precisely,” said Mr. Wynnstay, warmly ; “ all the ridicu¬ 
lous Radical nostrums of the last fifty years—you have hit 
them off exactly. Sometimes you rob more and propitiate 
less ; sometimes you rob less and propitiate more. But the 
principle is always the same.” And mindful of all those intol¬ 
erable evenings, when these same Radical nostrums had been 
forced down his throat at his own table, he threw a pugnacious 
look at his wife, who smiled back serenely in reply. There is 
small redress, indeed, for these things, when out of the common 
household stock the wife possesses most of the money, and a 
vast proportion of the brains. 

“ And the cynic takes pleasure in observing,” interrupted the 
squire, “ that the man who effects the change of balance does 
it in the loftiest manner, and profits in the vulgarest way. 
Other trades may fail. The agitator is always sure of his 
market.” 

He spoke with a harsh, contemptuous insistence which was 
gradually setting every nerve in Robert’s body tingling. He 
bent forward again, his long, thin frame and boyish, bright- 
complexioned face making an effective contrast to the squire’s 
bronzed and wrinkled squareness. 

“ Oh, if you and Mr. Wynnstay are prepared to draw an in¬ 
dictment against your generation and all its works, I have no 
more to say,” he said smiling still, though his voice had risen 
a little in spite of himself. “ I should be content to withdraw 
with my Burke into the majority. I imagined your attack on 
enthusiasm had a narrower scope, but if it is to be made svn- 
onymous with social progress I give up. The subject is too 
big. Only—” 

He hesitated. Mr. Wynnstay was studying him with some¬ 
what insolent coolness ; Lady Charlotte’s eyeglass never wav- 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


261 


ered from his face, and he felt through every fiber the tender, 
timid admonitions of his wife’s eyes. 

“ However,” he went on, after an instant, “ I imagine that 
we should find it difficult anyhow to discover common ground. 

I regard your archbishop’s maxim, Mr. Wendover,” and his 
tone quickened and grew louder, “ as first of all a contradic¬ 
tion in terms ; and in the next place, to me, almost all enthu¬ 
siasms are respectable ! ” 

“You are one of those people, I see,” returned Mr. Wend¬ 
over, after a pause, with the same nasal emphasis and the 
same hauteur, “ who imagine we owe civilization to the heart ; 
that mankind has felt its way—literally. The school of the 
majority of course—I admit it amply. I, on the other hand, 
am with the benighted minority who believe that the world, 
so far as it has lived to any purpose, has lived by the headf 
and he flung the noun at Robert scornfully. “ But I am quite 
aware that in a world of claptrap the philosopher gets all the 
kicks, and the philanthropists, to give them their own label, 
all the half-pence.” 

The impressive tone had gradually warmed to a heat which 
was unmistakable. Lady Charlotte looked on with increasing 
relish. To her all society was a comedy plaj^ed for her enter¬ 
tainment, and she detected something more dramatic than 
usual in the juxtaposition of these two men. That young rec¬ 
tor might be worth looking after. The dinners in Martin 
Street were alarmingly in want of fresh blood. As for poor 
Mr. Bickerton, he had begun to talk hastily to Catherine, with 
a sense of something tumbling about his ears ; while Mr. Long- 
staffe, eyeglass in hand, surveyed the table with a distinct 
sense of pleasurable entertainment. He had not see much of 
Elsmere yet, but it was as clear as daylight that the man was 
a firebrand, and should be kept in order. 

Meanwhile there was a pause between the two main disput¬ 
ants ; the storm clouds were deepening outside, and rain had 
begun to patter on the windows. Mrs. Darcy was just calling 
attention to the weather when the squire unexpectedly re¬ 
turned to the charge. 

“ The one necessary thing in life,” he said, turning to Lady 
Charlotte, a slight irritating smile playing round his strong, 
mouth, “ is—not to be duped. Put too much faith in these 
fine things the altruists talk of, and you arrive one day at the 
condition of Louis XIV. after the battle of Raniillies : ‘ Dieii 

a done oublie tout ce] que fai fait pour lui f ’ Read your 
Renan : remind yourself at every turn that it is quite possi¬ 
ble after all the egotist may turn out to be in the right of it. 


262 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


and you will find, at any rate, that the world gets on excellent¬ 
ly well without your blundering efforts to set it straight. And 
so we get back to the archbishop’s maxim—adapted, no doubt, 
to English requirements,” and he shrugged his great shoulders 
expressively : ‘‘ Pace Mr. Elsmere, of course, and the rest of 

our clerical friends ! ” 

Again he looked down the table, and the strident voice 
sounded harsher than ever as it rose above the sudden noise of 
the storm outside. Robert’s bright eyes were fixed on the 
squire, and before Mr. Wendover stopped, Catherine could see 
the words of reply trembling on his lips. 

‘‘ I am well content,” he said, with a curious dry intensity 
of tone. “ I give you your Renan. Only leave us poor dupes 
our illusions. AVe will not quarrel with the division. With 
you all the cynics of history; with us all the ‘ scorners of the 
ground ’ from the world’s beginning until now ! ” 

The squire made a quick, impatient movement. Mr. Wynn- 
stay looked significantly at his wife, who dropped her eyeglass 
with a little irrepressible smile. 

As for Robert, leaning forward with hastened breath, it 
seemed to him that his eyes and the squire’s crossed like 
swords. In Robert’s mind there had arisen a sudden passion 
of antagonism. Before his eyes there was a vision of a child 
in a stifling room, struggling with mortal disease, imposed 
upon her, as he hotly reminded himself, by this man’s culpable 
neglect. The dinner party, the splendor of the room, the con¬ 
versation, excited a kind of disgust in him. If it Avere not for 
Catherine’s pale face opposite he could hardly have maintained 
his self-control. 

Mrs. Darcy, a little bewildered, and feeling that things were 
not going particularly well, throught it best to interfei*e. 

“ Roger,” she said plaintively, “ you must not be so philo¬ 
sophical. It’s too hot ! He used to talk like that,” she went 
on, bending over to Mr. Wynnstay, “ to the French priests who 
came to see us last winter in Paris. They never minded a bit 
—they used to laugh. ‘ Monsieur voire frbre^ madame, dest 
un homme qui a trop lu^ they would say to me when I gave 
them their coffee. Oh, they were such dears, these old priests ! 
Roger said they had great hopes of me.” 

The chatter Avas welcome, the conversation broke up. The 
squire turned to Lady Charlotte, and Rose to Langham. 

Why didn’t you support Robert ? ” she said to'him impul¬ 
sively, with a dissatisfied face. “ lie Avas alone, against the 
table ! ” ^ 

What good should I have done him ? ” he asked, Avith a 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


263 


shrug. “ And pray, my lady confessor, what enthusiasms do 
you suspect me of ? ” 

He looked at her intently. It seemed to her they were by 
the gate again—the touch of his lips on her hand. She turned 
from him hastily, to stoop for her fan which had slipped away. 
It was only Catherine who, for her annoyance, saw the scarlet 
flush leap into the fair face. An instant later Mrs. Darcy had 
given the signal. 

CHAPTER XVHI. 

After dinner Lady Charlotte fixed herself at first on Cathe¬ 
rine, whose quiet dignity during the somewhat trying ordeal 
of the dinner had impressed her, but a few minutes’ talk pro¬ 
duced in her the conviction that without a good deal of 
pains—and why should a Londoner, accustomed to the cream of 
things, take pains with a country clergyman’s wife ?—she was 
not likelj^ to get much out of her. Her appearance promised 
more. Lady Charlotte thought, than her convei’sation justified, 
and she looked about for easier game. 

‘‘ Are you Mr. Elsmere’s sister ? ” said a loud voice over 
Rose’s head ; and Rose, who had been turning over an illus¬ 
trated book, with a mind wholly detached from it, looked up 
to see Lady Charlotte’s massive form standing over her. 

“No, his sister-in-law,” said Rose, flushing in spite of her¬ 
self, for Lady Charlotte was distinctly formidable. 

“ Hum,” said her questioner, depositing herself beside her. 
“ I never saw two sisters more unlike. You have got a very 
argum en tative brother-in -1 aw. ” 

Rose said nothing, partly from awkwardness, partly from 
rising antagonism. 

“ Did you agree with him ? ” asked Lady Charlotte, put¬ 
ting up her glass and remorsely studying every detail of the 
pink dress, its ornaments, and the slippered feet peeping out 
beneath it. 

“ Entirely,” said Rose, fearlessly, looking her full in the 
face. 

“ And what can you know about it, I wonder ? However, 
you are on the right side. It is the fashion nowadays to 
have enthusiasms. I suppose you muddle about among the. 
poor like other people ? ” 

“ I know nothing about the poor,” said Rose. 

“ Oh, then, I suppose you feel yourself effective enough in 
some other line ? ” said‘ the other coolly. “ What is it— 
lawn tennis, or private theatricals, or—hem—prettiness ? ” 
And again the eyeglass went up. 


264 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


“ Whichever you like, said Rose calmly, the scarlet on her 
cheek deepening, while she resolutely reopened her book. 
The manner of the other had quite effaced in her all that sense 
of obligation, as from the young to the old, which she had 
been very carefully brought up in. Never had she beheld 
such an extraordinary woman. 

“ Don’t read,” said Lady Charlotte complacently. “ Look 
at me. “ It’s your duty to talk to me, you know ; and I won’t 
make myself any more disagreeable than 1 can heljj. I gene¬ 
rally make myself disagreeable, and yet, after all, there are a 
great many people who like me.” 

Rose turned a countenance rippling with suppressed laughter 
on her companion. Lady Charlotte had a large, fair face, and 
a great deal of nose and chin, and an erection of lace and 
feathers on her head that seemed in excellent keeping with the 
masterful emphasis of those features. Her eyes stared frankly 
and unblushingly at the world, only softened at intervals by 
the glasses which were so used as to make them a most effect¬ 
ive adjunct of her conversation. Socially, she was absolutely 
devoid of weakness or of shame. She found society extremely 
interesting, and she always struck straight for the desirable 
things in it, making short work of all those delicate tentative 
processes of acquaintanceship by which men and women ordi¬ 
narily sort themselves. Rose’s brilliant, vivacious beauty 
had caught her eye at dinner ; she adored beauty as she adored 
anything effective, and she always took a queer pleasure in 
bullying her way into a girl’s liking. It is a great thing to be 
persuaded that at bottom you have a good heart. Lady Char¬ 
lotte was so persuaded, and allowed herself many things in 
consequence. 

“ What shall we talk about ? ” said Rose demurely. “ What 
a magnificent old house this is ! ” 

“ Stuff and nonsense ! I don’t want to talk about the house. 
I am sick to death of it. And if your people live in the parish, 
you are too. I return to my question. Come, tell me, what 
is your particular line in life ? I am sure you have one, by 
your face. You had better tell me ; it will do you no harm.” 

Lady Charlotte settled herself comfortably on the sofa, and 
Rose, seeing that there was no chance of escaping her tor¬ 
mentor, felt her spirits rise to an encounter. 

“ Really—Lady Charlotte ”—and she looked down, and 
then up, with a feigned bashfulness—“ I—I—play a little.” 

“ Humph ! ” said her questioner again, rather disconcerted 
by the obvious missishness of the answer. “ You do, do you ? 
More’s the pity. No woman who respects herself ought to 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


265 


play the piano nowadays. A professional told me the other day 
that until nineteen twentieths of the profession were strung 
up, there would be no chanee for the rest ; and as for ama¬ 
teurs, there is simply no room for them whatever. I can’t con¬ 
ceive anything more passe than amateur pianoforte playing ! ” 

“I don’t play the piano,” said Rose meekly. 

“What—the fashionable instrument, the banjo?” laughed 
Lady Charlotte. “ That would be really striking.” 

Rose was silent again, the corners of her mouth twitching. 

“ Mrs. Darcy,” said her neighbor, raising her voice, “ this 
young lady tells me she plays something ; what is it ? ” 

Mrs. Darcy looked in a rather helpless way at Catherine. 
She was dreadfully afraid of Lady Charlotte. 

Catherine, with a curious reluctance, gave the required in¬ 
formation ; and then Lady Charlotte insisted that the violin 
should be sent for, as it had not been brought. 

“ Who accompanies you ? ” she inquired of Rose. 

“ Mr. Langham plays very well,” said Rose indifferently. 

Lady Charlotte raised her eyebrows. “ That dark, Byronic- 
looking creature who came with you ? I should not have im¬ 
agined him capable of anything sociable. Letitia, shall I send 
my maid to the rectory, or can you spare a man ? ” 

Mrs. Darcy hurriedly gave orders, and Rose, inwardly 
furious, was obliged to submit. Then Lady Charlotte, hav¬ 
ing gained her point, and secured a certain amount of diver¬ 
sion for the evening, lay back on the sofa, used her fan, and 
yawned till the gentlemen appeared. 

AVhen they came in, the precious violin, which Rose never 
trusted to any other hands but her own without trepidation, 
had just arrived, and its owner, more erect than usual, because 
more nervous, was trying to prop up a dilapidated music- 
stand which Mrs. Darcy had unearthed for her. As Langham 
came in, she looked up and beckoned to him. 

“ Do you see ? ” she said to him impatiently, “ they have 
made me play. Will you accompany me ? I am very sorry, 
but there is no one else.” 

If there was one thing Langham loathed on his own account, 
it was any sort of performance in public. But the half-plaint¬ 
ive look which accompanied her last words showed that she 
knew it, and he did his best to be amiable. 

“ I am altogether at your service,” he said, sitting down 
with resignation. 

“It is all that tiresome woman. Lady Charlotte Wynnstay,” 
she whispered to him behind the music-stand. “ I never saw 
such a person in my life.” 


266 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


‘‘ Macaulay’s Lady Holland without the brains,” suggested 
Langham, with languid* vindictiveness as he gave her the 
note. 

Meanwhile Mr. Wynnstay and the squire sauntered together. 

‘‘ A village Norman-Neruda ? ” whispered the guest to the 
host. The squire shrugged his shoulders. 

“ Hush ! ” said Lady Charlotte, looking severely at her 
husband. Mr. Wynnstay’s smile instantly disappeared ; he 
leaned against the doorway and stared sulkily at the ceiling. 
Then the musicians began some Hungarian melodies put 
together by a younger rival of Brahams. They had not 
played twenty bars before the attention of every one in the 
room was more or less seized—unless we except Mr. Bicker- 
ton, whose children, good soul, were all down with some in¬ 
fantile ailment- or other, and who was employed in furtively 
watching the clock all the time to see when it would be decent 
to order round the pony-carriage which would take him back 
to his pale, overweighted spouse. 

First came wild snatches of march music, primitive, savage, 
non-European ; then a waltz of the lightest, maddest rhythm, 
broken here and there by strange barbaric clashes ; then a 
song, plaintive and clinging, rich in the subtlest shades and 
melancholies of modern feeling. 

“ Ah, but excellent! ” said Lady Charlotte once, under her 
breath, at a pause ; “and what entrain —what beauty ! ” 

For Rose’s figure was standing thrown out against the dusky 
blue of the tapestried walls, and from that delicate relief every 
curve, every grace, each tint—hair and cheek and gleaming 
arm gained an enchanting, picture-like distinctness. There 
was jasmine at her waist and among the gold of her hair ; the 
crystals on her neck, and on the little shoe thrown forward 
beyond her dress, caught the lamp-light. 

“How can that man play with her and not fall in love with 
her?” thought Lady Charlotte to herself with a sigh, perhaps 
for her own youth, “He looks cool enough, however ; the 
typical don with his nose in the air ! ” 

Then the slow, passionate sweetness of the music swept her 
away with it, she being in her way a connoisseur, and she 
ceased to speculate. When the sounds ceased there was silence 
for a moment. Mrs. Darcy, who had a piano in her sitting- 
room whereon she strummed every morning with her tiny 
rheumatic fingers, and who had, as we know, strange littfe 
veins of sentiment running all about her, stared at Rose with 
open mouth. So did Catherine. Perhaps it was then for the 
first time that, touched by this publicity, this contagion of 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


267 


other people’s feeling, Catherine reahzed fully against what a 
depth of stream she had been building her useless barriers. 

“ More ! more ! ” cried Lady Charlotte. 

The whole room seconded the demand save the squire and 
Mr. Bickerton. They withdrew together into a distant oriel. 
Robert, who was delighted with his little sister-in-law’s suc¬ 
cess, went smiling to talk of it to Mrs. Darcy, while Catherine, 
wdth a gentle .coldness, answered Mr. Longstaffe’s questions 
on the same theme. 

“ Shall we ? ” said Rose, panting a little, but radiant, look¬ 
ing down on her companion. 

^ ‘‘ Command me-! ” he said, his grave lips slightly smiling, 
his eyes taking in the same vision that had charmed Lady 
Charlotte’s. What a “ child of grace and genius ! ” 

‘‘ But do you like it ? ” she persisted. 

“ Like it—like accompanying your playing ? ” 

‘‘ Oh, no ! ” impatiently ; “ showing off, I mean. I am 
quite ready to stop.” 

“ Go on ; go on ! ” he said, laying his finger on the A. 
“ You have driven all my mauvaise honte away. I have not 
heard you play so splendidly yet.” 

She flushed all over. “ Then we will go on,” she said 
briefly. 

So they plunged again into an Andante and Scherzo of 
Beethoven. How the girl threw herself into it, bringing out 
the wailing love-song of the Andante, the dainty tripping 
mirth of the Scherzo, in a way which set every nerve in Lang- 
ham vibrating ! Yet the art of it was wholly unconscious. 
The music was the mere natural voice of her inmost self. A 
comparison full of excitement was going on in that self be¬ 
tween her first impressions of the man beside her, and her con¬ 
sciousness of him as he seemed to-night, human, sympathetic, 
kind. A blissful sense of a mission filled the young, silly soul. 
Like David, she was pitting herself and her gift against those 
dark powers which may invade and paralyze a life. 

After the shouts of applause at the end had yielded to a 
burst of talk, in the midst of which Lady Charlotte, with ex¬ 
quisite infelicity, might have been heard laying down the law 
to Catherine as to how her sister’s remarkable musical powers 
might be best perfected, Langham turned to his companion: 

Do you know that for years I have enjoyed nothing so 
much as the music of the last two days ? ” 

His black eyes shone upon her, transfused with something 
infinitely soft and friendly. She smiled. “ How little I ini- 
agined that first evening that you cared for music ! ” 


268 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


‘‘ Or about anything else worth caring for ? ” he asked her, 
laughing, but with always that little melancholy note in the 
laugh. 

“ Oh, if you like,” she said, with a shrug of her white 
shoulders. “ I believe you talked to Catherine the whole of 
the first evening, when you weren’t reading ‘ Hamlet ’ in the 
corner, about the arrangements for women’s education at 
Oxford.” 

“ Could I have found a more respectable subject ? ” he in¬ 
quired of her. 

“ The adjective is excellent,” she said, with a little face, as 
she put her violin into its case. ^ If I remember right, Cath¬ 
erine and I felt it personal. None of us were ever educated, 
except in arithmetic, sewing, English history, the Catechism, 
and ‘ Paradise Lost.’ I taught myself French at seventeen, 
because one Moliere wrote plays in it, and German because of 
Wagner. But they are my French and my German. I 
wouldn’t advise anybody else to steal them ! ” 

Langham was silent, watching the movements of the girl’s 
agile fingers. 

“ I wonder,” he said at last, slowly, “ when I shall play that 
Beethoven again ? ” 

“ To-morrow morning if you have a conscience,” she said 
dryly ; ‘‘ we murdered one or two passages in fine style.” 

He looked at her, startled. “ But I go by the morning 
train ! ” There was an instant’s silence. Then the violin-case 
shut with a snap. 

“ I thought it was to be Saturday,” she said abruptly. 

‘‘ No,” he answered, with a sigh, “ it was always Friday. 
There is a meeting in London I must get to to-morrow after¬ 
noon.” 

“ Then we sha’n’t finish these Hungarian duets,” she said 
slowly, turning away from him to collect some music on the 
piano. 

Suddenly a sense of the difference between the week behind 
him, with all its ups and downs, its quarrels, its ennuis, its 
moments of delightful intimacy, of artistic freedom and pleas¬ 
ure, and those threadbare, monotonous Aveeks into Avhich he 
was to slip back on the morrow, awoke in him a mad, incon¬ 
sequent sting of disgust, of self-pity. 

“ No, Ave shall finish nothing,” he said, in a voice Avhich 
only she could hear, his hands lying on the keys ; ‘‘ there are 
some Avhose destiny it is never to finish—never to have 
enough—to leave the feast on the table, and all the edges of 
life ragged I ” 


nOBERT ELSMERE. 


269 


Her lips trembled. They were far away, in the vast room, 
from the group Lady Charlotte was lecturing. Her nerves 
were all unsteady with music and feeling, and the face look¬ 
ing down on him had grown pale. 

“ We make our own destiny,” she said impatiently. We 
choose. It is all our own doing. Perhaps destiny begins 
things—friendship, for instance ; but afterward it is absurd 
to talk of anything but ourselves. We keep our friends, our 
chances, our—our joys,” she went on, hurriedly, trying des¬ 
perately to generalize, ‘‘ or we throw them away willfully, be¬ 
cause we choose.” 

Their eyes were riveted on each other. 

“ Not willfully,” he said, under his breath. “ But—no 
matter. May I take you at your word. Miss Leyburn? 
Wretched shirker that I am, whom even Robert’s charity des¬ 
pairs of: have I made a friend ? Can I keep her ? ” 

Extraordinary spell of the dark, effeminate face—of its rare 
smile ! The girl forgot all pride, all discretion. ‘‘ Try,” she 
whispered, and as his hand, stretching along the key-board, 
instinctively felt for hers, for one instant—and another, and 
another—she gave it to him. 

“ Albert, come here ! ” exclaimed Lady Charlotte, beckoning 
to her husband ; and Albert, though with a bad grace, obeyed. 

Just go and ask that girl to come and talk to me, will you ? 
Why on earth didn’t you make friends with her at dinner?” 

The husband made some irritable answer, and the wife 
laughed. 

“ Just like you! ” she said, with a good humor which seemed 
to him solely caused by the fact of his non-success with the 
beauty at table. “ You always expect to kill at the first stroke. 
I mean to take her in tow. Go and bring her here.” 

Mr. Wynnstay sauntered off with as much dignity as his 
stature was capable of. He found Rose tying up her music at 
one end of the piano, while Langham was preparing to shut up 
the key-board. 

There was something appeasing in the girl’s handsomeness. 
Mr. Wynnstay laid down his airs, paid her various compli¬ 
ments, and led her off to Lady Charlotte. 

Langham stood by the piano, lost in a kind of miserable 
dream. Mrs. Darcy fluttered up to him. 

‘‘ Oh, Mr. Langham, you play so beautifully ! Do play a 
solo ! ” 

He subsided on to the music bench obediently. On any or¬ 
dinary occasion tortures could not have induced him to per- 


270 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


form in a room full of strangers. He had far too lively and 
fastidious a sense of the futility of the amateur. 

But he played—what, he knew not. Nobody listened but 
Mrs. Darcy, who sat lost in an arm-chair a little way olf, her 
tiny foot beating time. Rose stopped talking, started, tried to 
listen. But Lady Charlotte had had enough music, and so had 
Mr. Longstaffe, who was endeavoring to joke himself into the 
good graces of the Duke of Sedbergh’s sister. The din of con¬ 
versation rose at the challenge of the piano, and Langham was 
soon overcrowded. 

Musically, it was perhaps as well, for the player’s inward 
tumult was so great that what his hands did he hardly knew 
or cared. He felt himself the greatest ci*iniinal unhung. Sud¬ 
denly, through all that willful mist of epicurean feeling which 
had been in wrapping him, there had pierced a sharp, illumin¬ 
ing beam from a girl’s eyes aglow with joy, with hope, with 
tenderness. In the name of Heaven, what had this growing 
degeneracy of every moral muscle led him to now ? AVhat! 
smile and talk and smile—and be a villain all the time ? AVhat! 
encroach on a young life, like some creeping parasitic growth, 
taking all, able to give nothing in return—not even one genu¬ 
ine spark of genuine passion ? Go philandering on till a child 
of nineteen shows you her warm, impulsive heart, play on her 
imagination, on her pity, safe all the while in the reflection that 
by the next day you will be far away, and her task and yours 
will be alike to forget! He shrinks from himself as one shrinks 
from a man capable of injuring anything weak and helpless. 
To despise the world’s social code, and then to fall conspicu¬ 
ously below its simplest articles; to aim at being pure intelli¬ 
gence, pure, open-eyed rationality, and not even to succeed in 
being a gentleman, as the poor commonplace world under¬ 
stands it ! Oh, to fall at her feet, and ask her pardon before 
parting forever ! But no—no more posing; no more drama¬ 
tizing. How can he get away most quietly—make least sign ? 
The thought of that walk home in the darkness fills him with 
a passion of irritable impatience. 

“ Look at that Romney, Mr. Elsmere; just look at it! ” cried 
Dr. Meyrick excitedly; “did you ever see anything finer? 
There was one of those London dealer fellows down here last 
summer offered the squire four thousand pounds down on the 
nail for it.” 

In this way Meyrick had been taking Robert round the draw¬ 
ing-room, doing the honors of every stick and stone in it, his 
eyeglass in his eye, his thin old face shining with pride 
over the AA^endover possessions. And so the two gradually 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


271 


neared the oriel where the squire and Mr. Bickerton were 
standing. 

Robert was in twenty minds as to any further conversation 
with the squire. After the ladies had gone, while every nerve 
in him was still tingling with anger, he had done his best to 
keep up indifferent talk on local matters with Mr. Bickerton. 
Inwardly he was asking himself wliether he should ever sit at 
the squire’s table and eat his bread again. It seemed to him 
that they had had a brush which would be difficult to forget. 
And as he sat there before the squire’s wine, hot with righteous 
heat, all his grievances against the man and the landlord 
crowded upon him. A fig for intellectual eminence if it make 
a man oppress his inferiors and bully his equals ! 

But as the minutes passed on, the rector had cooled down. 
The sweet, placable, scrupulous nature began to blame itself. 
“ What, play your cards so badR, give up the game so rashly, the 
very first round. There must be some cause in the background. 
No need to be white-livered, but every need, in the case of 
such a man as the squire, to take no hasty, needless offense.” 

So he had cooled and cooled, and now here were Meyrick 
and he close to the squire and his companion. The two men, 
as the rector approached, were discussing some cases of com¬ 
mon inclosure that had just taken place in the neighborliood. 
Robert listened a moment, then struck in. Presently, when 
the chat dropped, he began to express to the squire his pleas¬ 
ure in the use of the library. His manner was excellent, 
courtesy itself, but without any trace of effusion. 

‘‘ I believe,” he said at last, smiling, ‘‘ my father used to be 
allowed the same privileges. If so, it quite accounts for the 
way in which he clung to Mure well.” 

“ I had never the honor of Mr. Edward Elsmere’s acquaint¬ 
ance,” said the squire frigidly. During the time of his 
occupation of the rectory I was not in England.” 

“I know. Do you still go much to German}^? Do you 
keep up your relations with Berlin ? ” 

“ I have not seen Berlin for fifteen years,” said the squire 
bi4efly, his eyes in their wrinkled sockets fixed sharply on 
the man who ventured to question him about himself, unin¬ 
vited. There was an awkward pause. Then the squire turned 
again to Mr. Bickerton. 

“ Bickerton, have you noticed how many trees that storm 
of last February has brought down at the northeast corner of 
the park ? ” 

Robert was inexpressibly galled by the movement, by the 
words themselves. The squire had not yet addressed a single 


272 


ROBERT BLSMERE. 


remark of an}^ kind about Mure well to him. There was a 
deliberate intention to exclude implied in this appeal to the 
man who was not the man of the place, on such a local point, 
which struck Robert very forcibly. 

He walked away to where his wife was sitting. 

‘‘ What time is it ? ” whispered Catherine, looking up at him. 

“ Time to go,” he returned, smiling, but she caught the dis¬ 
composure in his tone and look at once, and her wifely heart 
rose against the squire. She got up, drawing herself together 
with a gesture that became her. 

“ Then let us go at once,” she said. “ Where is Rose ? ” 

A minute later there was a general leave-taking. Oddly 
enough it found the squire in the midst of a conversation with 
Langham. As though to show more clearly that it was the 
rector personally who was in his black books, Mr. Wendover 
had already devoted some cold attention to Catherine both at 
and after dinner, and he had no sooner routed Robert than 
he moved in his slouching way across from Mr. Bickerton to 
Langham. And now, another man, altogether, he was talk¬ 
ing and laughing—describing apparently a reception at the 
French Academy—the epigrams flying, the harsh face all 
lighted up, the thin, bony fingers gesticulating freely. 

The husband and wife exchanged glances as they stood 
waiting, while Lady Charlotte, in her loudest voice, was com¬ 
manding Rose to come and see her in London any Thursday 
after the first of November. Robert was very sore. Cather¬ 
ine passionately felt it, and forgetting everything but him, 
longed to be out with him in the park comforting him. 

What an absurd fuss you have been making about that 
girl,” Wynnstay exclaimed to his wife, as the Elsmere party 
left the room, the squire conducting Catherine with a chill 
politeness. “ And now, I suppose, you will be having her up 
in town, and making some young fellow who ought to know 
better fall in love with her. I am told the father was a 
grammar-school head master. Why can’t you leave people 
where they belong ? ” 

“ I have already pointed out to you,” Lady Charlotte 
observed, calmly, “ that the world has moved on since you 
were launched into it. I can’t keep up class distinctions to 
please you ; otherwise, no doubt, being the devoted wife I am, 
I might try. However, my dear, we both have our fancies. 
You collect Sevres china with or without a pedigree,” and she 
coughed dryly ; A* I collect promising young women. On the 
whole, I think my hobby is more beneficial to you than yours 
is profitable to me.” 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


- 273 


Mr. Wynn stay was furious. Only a week before he had been 
childishly, shamefully taken in by a Jew curiosity dealer from 
Vienna, to his wife’s huge amusement. If looks could have 
crushed her. Lady Charlotte would have been crushed. But 
she was far too substantial as she lay back in her chair, one 
large foot crossed over the other, and, as her husband very 
well knew, the better man of the two. He walked away, mur¬ 
muring under his mustache words that would hardly have 
borne publicity, while Lady Charlotte, through her glasses, 
made a minute study of a little French portrait hanging some 
two yards from her. 

Meanwhile the Elsmere party were stepping out into the 
warm damp of the night. The storm had died away, but a soft 
Scotch mist of rain filled the air. Everything was dark, save 
for a few ghostly glimmerings through the trees of the avenue; 
and there was a strong, sweet smell of wet earth and grass. 
Rose had drawn the hood of her waterproof over her head, 
and her face gleamed an indistinct whiteness from its shelter. 
Oh, this leaping pulse—the bright glow of expectation ! How 
had she made this stupid blunder about his going ? Oh, it was 
Catherine’s mistake, of course, at the beginning. But what 
matter ? Here they were in the dark, side by side, friends 
now, friends always. Catherine should not spoil their last 
walk together. She felt a passionate trust that he would not 
allow it. 

‘‘ Wifie ! ” exclaimed Robert, drawing her a little apart, do 
you know it has just occurred to me that, as I was going 
through the park this afternoon by the lower footpath, I 
crossed Henslowe coming away from the house. Of course 
this is what has happened ! He has told his story first. No 
doubt just before I met him he had been giving the squire a 
full and particular account —d la Henslowe—of my proceedings 
since I came. Henslowe lays it on thick—paints with a will. 
The squire receives me afterward as the meddlesome pragmat¬ 
ical priest he understands me to be ; puts his foot down to 
begin Avith ; and, hinc Him lacrymm. It’s as clear as day¬ 
light! I thought that man had an odd twist of the lip as he 
passed me.” 

“ Then a disagreeable evening will be the worst of it,” said 
Catherine proudly. “ I imagine, Robert, you can defend 
yourself against that bad man ? ” 

“ He has got the start ; he has no scruples ; and it remains 
to be seen whether the squire has a heart to appeal to,” replied 
the young rector, with sore reflectiveness. “Oh, Catherine, 


274 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


have you ever thought, wifie, what a business it will be for us 
if I canH make friends with that man ? Here we are at his 
gates—all our people in his power ; the comfort, at any rate, 
of our social life depending on him. And what a strange, un¬ 
manageable, inexplicable being ! ” 

Elsmere sighed aloud. Like all quick,'imaginative natures 
he was easily depressed, and the squire’s somber figure had for 
the moment darkened his whole horizon. Catherine laid her 
cheek against his arm in the darkness, consoling, remonstrat¬ 
ing, every other thought lost in her sympathy with Robert’s 
worries. Langham and Rose slipped out of her head ; Els- 
mere’s step had quickened, as it alwaj^s did when he was ex¬ 
cited, and she kept up without thinking. 

When Langham found the others had shot ahead in the 
darkness, and he and his neighbor were tete-d-tete, despair 
seized him. But for once he sliowed a sort of dreary presence 
of mind. Suddenly, while the girl beside him was floating in 
a golden dream of feeling, he plunged with a stiff deliberation 
born of his inner conflict into a discussion of the German sys¬ 
tem of musical training. Rose, startled, made some vague and 
flippant reply. Langham pursued the matter. He had some 
information about it, it appeared, garnered up in his mind, 
which might perhaps some day prove Useful to her. A St. 
Anselm’s undergraduate, one Dash wood, an old pupil of his, 
had been lately at Berlin for six months, studying at the Con- 
servatorium. Not long ago, being anxious to become a school¬ 
master, he had written to Langham for a testimonial. His 
letter had contained a full account of his musical life. Lang¬ 
ham proceeded to recapitulate it. 

His careful and precise report of hours, fees, masters, and 
methods lasted till they reached the park gate. He had the 
smallest powers of social acting, and his role was dismal over¬ 
done. The girl beside him could not know that he was really 
defending her from himself. His cold, altered manner merely 
seemed to her a sudden and marked withdrawal of his petition 
for her friendship. No doubt she had received that petition 
too effusively—and he wished there should be no mistake. 

What a young, smarting soul went through in that half- 
mile of listening is better guessed than analyzed. There are 
certain moments of shame, which only women know, and 
which seem to sting and burn out of youth all its natu.ial 
sweet self-love. A woman may outlive them, but never forget 
them. If she pass through one at nineteen lier cheek will 
grow hot over it at seventy. Her companion’s measured tone, 
the flow of deliberate speech which came from him, the nerv- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


275 


ous aloofness of his attitude—every detail in that walk seemed 
to Rose’s excited sense an insult. 

As the park gate swung behind them she felt a sick longing 
for Catherine’s shelter. Then all the pride in her rushed to the 
rescue and held that swooning dismay at the heart of her in 
check. And forthwith she capped Langham’s minute account 
of the scale-method of a famous Berlin pianist some witty 
stories of the latest Loudon prodigy, a child-violinist, incred¬ 
ibly gifted, dirty, and greedy, whom she had made friends 
with in town. The young girl’s voice rang out sharp and hard 
under the trees. Where, in fortune’s name, were the lights of 
the rectory ? Would this nightmare never come to an end? 

At the rectory gate was Catherine waiting for them, her 
whole soul one repentant alarm. 

“ Mr. Langham, Robert has gone to the study ; will you go 
and smoke with him ? ” 

“ By all means. Good-night, then, Mrs. Elsmere,” 

Catherine gave him her hand. Rose was trying hard to lit 
the lock of the gate into the hasp, and had no hand free. 
Besides, he did not approach her. 

“ Good-night,” she said to him over her shoulder. 

“ Oh, and Mr. Langham ! ” Catherine called after him as he 
strode aAvay, ‘‘ wdll you settle wdth Robert about the carriage ? ” 

He turned, made a sound of assent, and went on. 

“ When ? ” asked Rose, lightly. 

“For the nine o’clock train.” 

“There should be a law^ against interfering wdth people’s 
breakfast hour,” said Rose : “ though to be sure, a guest may 
as well get himself gone early and be done with it. How you 
and Robert raced, Cathie ! We did our best to catch you up, 
but the'pace was too good.” 

Was there a wild taunt, a spice of malice in the girl’s reck¬ 
less voice ? Catherine could not see her in the darkness, but 
the sister felt a sudden trouble invade her. 

“ Rose, darling, you are not tired ? ” 

“ Oh, dear, no ! Good-night, sleep well. What a goose 
Mrs. Darcy is ! ” 

And, barely submitting to be kissed. Rose ran up the steps 
and upstairs. 

Langham and Robert smoked till midnight. Langham for 
the first time gave Elsmere an outline of his plans for the fut¬ 
ure, and Robert, filled with dismay at this final breach of Ox¬ 
ford and human society, and the only form of practical life 
possible to such a man, threw himself into protests more and 
more vigorous and affectionate. Langham listened to them at 


276 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


first with somber silence, then with an impatience which grad¬ 
ually reduced Robert to a sore puffing at his pipe. There was 
a long space during which they sat together, the ashes of the 
little fire Robert had made dropping on the hearth, and not a 
word on either side. 

At last Elsmere could not bear it, and when midnight struck 
he sprang up with an impatient shake of his long bod}'-, and 
Langham took the hint, gave him a cold good-night, and went. 

As the door shut upon him Robert dropped back into his 
chair, and sat on, his face in his hands, staring dolefully at the 
fire. It seemed to him the world was going crookedl}^ A 
day on which a man of singularly open and responsive temper 
makes a new enemy, and comes nearer than ever before to 
losing an old friend, shows very blackly to him in the calen¬ 
dar, and, by way of aggravation, Robert Elsmere says to him¬ 
self at once that somehow or other there must be fault of his 
own in the matter. 

Rose !—pshaw ! Catherine little knows what stuff that 
cold, intangible soul is made of. 

Meanwhile, Langham was standing heavily, looking out into 
the night. The different elements in the mountain of discom¬ 
fort that weighed upon him were so many that the weary 
mind made no attempt to analyze them. He had a sense of dis¬ 
grace, of having stabbed something gentle that had leaned 
upon him, mingled with a strong intermittent feeling of un¬ 
utterable relief. Perhaps his keenest regret was that, after 
all, it had not been love ! He had offered himself up to a girl’s 
just contempt, but he had no recompense in the shape of a great 
addition to knowledge, to experience. Save for a few doubtful 
moments at the beginning, when he had all but surprised him¬ 
self in something more poignant, what he had been conscious 
of had been nothing more than a suave and delicate charm of 
sentiment, a subtle surrender to one exquisite aesthetic impres¬ 
sion after another. And these things in other relations the 
world had yielded him before. 

“ Am I sane ! ” he muttered to himself. “ Have I ever been 
sane ? Probably not. The disproportion between my motives 
and other men’s is too great to be normal. Well, at least I am 
sane enough to shut myself up. Long after that beautiful 
child had forgotten she ever saw me I shall still be doing pen¬ 
ance in the desert.” 

He threw himself down beside the open window with a 
groan. An hour later he lifted a face blanched and lined, and 
stretched out his hand with avidity toward a book op the 
table. It was an obscure and difficult Greek text, and he 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


277 


spent the greater part of the night over it, rekindling in him¬ 
self with feverish haste the embers of his one lasting passion. 

Meanwhile, in a room overhead, another last scene in this 
most futile of dramas was passing. Rose, when she came in, 
had locked the door, torn off her dress and her ornaments, 
and flung herself on the edge of the bed, her hands on her 
knees, her shoulders drooping, a fierce red spot on either cheek. 
There for an indefinite time she went through a torture of self¬ 
scorn. The incidents of the week passed before her one by 
one—her sallies, her defiances, her impulsive friendliness, the 
elayi, the happiness of the last two days, the self-abandonment 
of this evening. Oh, intolerable—intolerable ! 

And all to end with the intimation that she had been behav¬ 
ing like a forward child—had gone too far and must be admon¬ 
ished—made to feel accordingly ! The poisoned arrow pierced 
deeper and deeper into the girl’s shrinking pride. The very 
foundations of self-respect seemed overthrown. 

Suddenly her eye caught a dim and ghostly reflection of her 
own figure, as she sat with locked hands on the edge of the 
bed, in a long glass near, the only one of the kind which the 
rectory household possessed. Rose sprang up, snatched at the 
candle, which was flickering in the air of the open window, 
and stood erect before the glass, holding the candle above her 
head. 

What the light showed her was a slim form in a white 
dressing-gown, that fell loosely about it; a rounded arm up- 
stretched ; a head, still crowned with its jasmine wreath, from 
which the bright hair fell heavily over shoulders and bosom ; 
eyes, under frowning brows, flashing a proud challenge at what 
they saw : two lips “ indifferent red,” just open to let the 
quick breath come through—all thrown into the wildest chiar¬ 
oscuro by the wavering candle flame. 

Her challenge w^as answered. The fault was not there. 
Her arm dropped. She put down the light. 

‘‘ I am handsome,” she said to herself, her mouth quivering 
childishly. “ I am. I may say it myself.” 

Then, standing by the window, she stared into the night. 
Her room, on the opposite side of the house from Langham’s, 
looked over the corn-fields and the distance. The stubbles 
gleamed faintly ; the dark woods, the clouds teased by the 
rising wind, sent a moaning voice to greet her. 

“ i hate him ! I hate him ! ” she cried to the darkness, 
clinching her cold little hand. 

Then "presently she slipped on to her knees, and buried her 
head in the bed-clothes. She was crying—angry stifled tears 


278 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


which had the hot impatience of youth in them. It all seemed 
to her so untoward. This was not the man she had dreamed 
of—the unknown of her inmost heart. He had been young, 
ardent, impetuous like herself. Hand in hand, eye flashing 
into eye, pulse answering to pulse, they would have flung 
aside the veil hanging over life and plundered the golden 
mysteries behind it. 

She rebels ; she tries to see the cold, alien nature which has 
laid this paralyzing spell upon her as it is, to reason herself 
back to peace—to indifference. The poor child flies from her 
own half-understood trouble ; will none of it; murmurs again 
wildly: 

“ I hate him ! I hate him ! Cold-blooded—ungrateful—un¬ 
kind ! ” 

Ill vain. A pair of melancholy eyes haunt, enthrall lier in¬ 
most soul. The charm of the denied, the inaccessible, is on 
her, woman-like. 

That old sense of capture, of helplessness, as of some lassoed, 
struggling creature, descended upon her. She lay sobbing 
there, trying to recall what she had been a week before ; the 
whirl of her London visit, the ambitions with which it had 
filled her ; the bewildering many-colored lights it had thrown 
upon life, the intoxicating sense of artistic power. In vain. 

“ The stream will not flow, and the hills will not rise; 

And the colors have all passed away from her eyes.” 

She felt.herself bereft, despoiled. And yet through it all, as 
she lay weeping, there came flooding a strange, contradictory 
sense of growTh, of enrichment. In such moments of pain 
does a woman first begin to live ? Ah ! why should it hurt 
so—this long-awaited birth of the soul ? 


BOOK IIL—THE SQUIRE. 

CHAPTER XIX. 

The evening of the Murewell Hall dinner-part}^ proved to 
be a date of some importance in the lives of two or three per¬ 
sons. Rose was not likely to forget it ; Langham carried 
about with him the picture of. the great drawing-room, its 
stately light and shade, and its scattered figures, through many 
a dismal subsequent hour ; and to Robert it was the beginning 
of a period of practical difficulties such as his fortunate youth 
had never yet encountered. 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 


279 


His conjecture had hit the mark. The squire’s sentiments 
toward him, which had been on the whole friewdly enough, 
with the exception of a slight nuance of contempt provoked 
in Mr. Wendover’s mind by all forms of the clerical calling, 
had been completely transformed in the course of the after¬ 
noon before the dinner-party, and transformed by the report 
of his agent. Henslowe, who knew certain sides of the squire’s 
character by heart, had taken Time b}^ the forelock. For 
fourteen years before Robert entered the parish he had been 
king of it. Mr. Preston, Robert’s predecessor, had never given 
him a moment’s trouble. The agent had developed a habit of 
drinking, had favored his friends and spited his enemies, and 
had allowed certain distant portions of the estate to go finely 
to ruin, quite undisturbed by any sentimental meddling of the 
priestly sort. Then the old rector had been gathered to the 
majoritj’', and this long-legged busybody had taken his place, 
a man, according to the agent, as full of communistical notions 
as an egg is full of meat, and always ready to poke his nose 
into other people’s business. And as all men like mastery, 
but especially Scotchmen, and as during even the first few 
months of the new rector’s tenure of office it became tolera¬ 
bly evident to Henslowe that young Elsmere would soon be¬ 
come the ruling force of the neighborhood unless measures 
were taken to prevent it, the agent, over his nocturnal drams, 
had taken sharp and cunning counsels with himself concern¬ 
ing the young man. 

The state of Mile End had been originally the result of indo¬ 
lence and caprice on his part rather than of any set purpose of 
neglect. As soon, however, as it was brought to his notice b}'' 
Elsmere, who did it, to begin with, in the friendliest way, it 
became a point of honor with the agent to let the place go to 
the devil,—nay, to hurry it there. For some time notwith¬ 
standing, he avoided an open breach with the rector. He met 
Elsmere’s remonstrances by a more or less civil show of argu¬ 
ment, belied every now and then b}' the sarcasm of his coarse 
blue eye, and so far the two men had kept outwardly on terms. 
Elsmere had reason to know that on one or two occasions of 
difficulty in the parish Henslowe had tried to do him a mis¬ 
chief. The attempts, however, had not greatlj^ succeeded, and 
their ill-success had j^robably excited in Elsmere a confidence 
of ultimate victory which had tended to keep him cool in the 
presence of Henslowe’s hostilit}^ But Henslowe had been all 
along merely waiting for the squire. He had served the owner 
of the Murewell estate for fourteen years, and if he did not 
know that owner’s peculiarities by this time, might he obtain 


280 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


certain warm corners in the next life to which he was fond of 
consigning other people ! It was not easy to cheat the squire 
out of money, but it was quite easy to play upon his ignorance 
of the details of English land management—ignorance guar¬ 
anteed by the learned habits of a life-time—on his complete 
lack of popular sympathy, and on the contempt felt by the 
disciple of Bismarck and Mommsen for all forms of altruistic 
sentiment. The squire despised priests. He hated philan¬ 
thropic cants. Above all things he respected his own leisure, 
and was abnormally, irritably sensitive as to any possible in¬ 
roads upon it. 

All these things Henslowe knew, and all these things he util¬ 
ized. He saw the squire within forty-eight hours of his arrival 
at Murewell. He fancy picture of Robert and his doings was 
introduced with adroitness, and colored with great skill, and 
he left the squire walking up and down his library, chafing 
alternately at the monstrous fate which had planted this sen¬ 
timental agitator at his gates, and at the memory of his own 
misplaced civilities toward the intruder. In the evening those 
civilities were abundantly avenged, as we have seen. 

Robert was much perplexed as to his next step. His heart 
was very sore. The condition of Mile End—those gaunt-e 3 "ed 
women and wasted children, all the sordid details of their un¬ 
just, avoidable suffering weighed upon his nerves perpetually. 
But he was conscious that this state of feeling was one of 
tension, perhaps of exaggeration, and though it was im¬ 
possible he should let the matter alone, he was anxious to do 
nothing rashl}’-. 

However, two days after the dinner-party he met Henslowe 
on the hill leading up to the rectory. Robort would have 
passed the man with a stiffening of his tall figure and the 
slightest possible salutation. But the agent, just returned from 
a round wherein the bars of various local inns had played a 
conspicious part, was in a truculent mood and stopped to 
speak. He took up the line of insolent condolence with the 
rector on the impossibility of carrying his wishes with regard 
to Mile End into effect. They had been iaid before the squire, 
of course, but the squire had his own ideas and wasn’t just 
easy to manage. 

“ Seen him yet, sir ? ” Henslowe wound up jauntily, every 
line of his flushed countenance, the full lips under the fair 
beard, and the light, prominent eyes, expressing a triumph he 
hardly cared to conceal. 

^ “ I have seen him, but I have not talked to him on this par¬ 
ticular matter,” said the rector quietly, though the red 


nOBERT EL8MEBE. 


281 


mounted in his cheek. “ You may, however, be very sure, 
Mr. Henslowe, that everything I know about Mile End the 
squire shall know before long.” 

“ Oh, Lor’ bless me, sir ! ” cried Henslowe with a guffaw, 
“ it’s all one to me. And if the squire ain’t satisfied with 
the way his work’s done now, why he can take you on as a 
second string, you know. You’d show us all. I’ll be bound, 
how to make the money fly.” 

Then Robert’s temper gave way, and he turned upon the 
half-drunken brute before him with a few home-truths de¬ 
livered with rapier-like force which for the moment staggered 
Henslowe, who turned from red to purple. The rector, with 
some of those pitiful memories of the hamlet, of which we 
had glimpses in his talk with Langbam, burning at his heart, 
felt the man no better than a murderer, and as good as told 
him so. Then, without giving him time to reply, Robert 
strode on, leaving Henslowe planted in the pathway. But 
he was hardly up the hill before the agent, having recovered 
himself by dint of copious expletives, was looking after him 
with a grim chuckle. He knew his master, and he knew him¬ 
self, and he thought between them they would about manage 
to keep that young spark in order. 

Robert meanwhile went straight home into his study, and 
there fell upon ink and paper. What was the good of pro¬ 
tracting the matter any longer ? Something must and should 
be done for these people, if not one way, then another. 

So he wrote to the squire, showing the letter to Catherine 
when it was done, lest there should be anything overfierce in 
it. It was the simple record of twelve months’ experience 
told with dignity and feeling. Henslowe was barely men¬ 
tioned in it, and the chief burden of the letter was to implore 
the squire to come and inspect certain portions of his property 
with his own eyes. The rector would be at his service any 
day or hour. 

Husband and wife went anxiously through the document, 
softening here, improving there, and then it was sent to the 
Hall. Robert waited nervously through the day for an ans¬ 
wer. In the evening, while he and Catherine were in the 
foot-path after dinner, watching a chilly autumnal moonrise 
over the stubbles of the corn-field, the answer came. 

‘‘H’m,”said Robert dubiously, as he opened it, holding it 
up to the moonlight; “ can’t be said to be lengthy.” 

He and Cathorine hurried into the house. Robert read the 
letter, and handed it to her without a word. 

After some curt references to one or two miscellaneous 


282 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


points raised in the latter part of the rector’s letter, the squire 
wound up as follows : 

“As for the bulk of your communication, I am at a loss to under¬ 
stand the vehemence of your remarks on the subject of niy Mile End 
property. My agent informed me shortly after my return home that 
you had been concerning yourself greatly, and, as he conceived, un¬ 
necessarily about the matter. Allow me to assure you that I have full 
confidence in Mr, Henslowe, who has been in the district for as many 
years as you have spent months in it, and whose authority on points 
connected with the business management of my estate naturally carries 
more weight with me, if you will permit me to say so, than your own. 

‘ ‘ I am, sir, your obedient servant, 

“Roger Wendover.” 

Catherine returned the letter to her husband with a look of 
dismay. He was standing with his back to the chimney-piece, 
his hands thrust far into his pockets, his upper lip quivering. 
In his happy, expansive life this was the sharpest personal re¬ 
buff that had ever happened to him. He could not but smart 
under it. 

“ Mot a word,” he said, tossing his hair back impetuously, as 
Catherine stood opposite watching him—“ not one single word 
about the miserable people themselves ! What kind of stuff 
can the man be made of ? ” 

“ Does he believe you ? ” asked Catherine, bewildered. 

“ If not one must try and make him,” he said energetically, 
after a moment’s pause. “ To-morrow, Catherine, I go down 
to the Hall and see him.” 

She quietly acquiesced, and the following afternoon, first 
thing after luncheon, she Avatched him go, her tender, inspir¬ 
ing look dwelling with him as he crossed the park, which was 
lying delicately wrapped in one of the whitest of autumnal 
mists, the sun just playing through it with pale, invading 
shafts. 

The butler looked at him with some doubtfulness. It was 
never safe to admit visitors for the squire without orders. But 
he and Robert had special relations. As the possessor of a 
bass voice worthy of his girth, Vincent, undei' Robert’s rule, 
had become the pillar of the choir, and it was not easy for him 
to refuse the rector. 

So Robert was led in, through the hall, and down the long 
passage to the curtained door, which he knew so well. 

“ Mr. Elsmere, sir ! ” 

There was a sudden hasty movement. Robert passed a 
magnificent lacquered screen newly placed round the door, and 
found himself in the squire’s presence. 

The squire had half risen from his seat in a capacious chair. 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


283 


with a litter of books round it, and confronted his visitor 
with a look of surprised annoyance. The figure of the rector, 
tall, thin, and youthful, stood out against the delicate browns 
and whites of the book-lined walls. The great room, so im¬ 
pressively bare when Robert and Langham had last seen it, 
was now full of the signs of a busy man’s constant habitation. 
An odor of smoke pervaded it ; the table in the window was 
piled with books just unpacked, and the half-emptied case 
from which they had been taken lay on the ground beside the 
squire’s chair. 

“ I persuaded Vincent to admit me, Mr. Wendover,” said 
Robert, advancing hat in hand, while the squire hastily put 
down the German professor’s pipe he had just been enjoying, 
and coldly accepted his proffered greeting. “ I should have 
preferred not to disturb you without an appointment, but after 
your letter it seemed to me some prompt personal explanation 
was necessary.” 

The squire stiffly motioned toward a chair, which Robert 
took, and then slipped back into his own, his wrinkled eyes 
fixed on the intruder. 

Robert, conscious of almost intolerable embarrassment, but 
maintaining in spite of it an excellent degree of self-control, 
plunged at once into business. He took the letter he had just 
received from the squire as a text, made a good-humored de¬ 
fense of his own proceedings, described his attempt to move 
Ilenslowe, and the reluctance of his appeal from the man to 
the master. The few things he allowed himself to say about 
Ilenslowe were in perfect temper, though by no means with¬ 
out an edge. 

Then, having disposed of the more personal aspects of the 
matter, he paused, and looked hesitatingly at the face oppo¬ 
site him, more like a bronze mask at this moment than a human 
countenance. The squire, however, gave him no help. lie 
had received his remarks so far in perfect silence, and seeing 
that there were more to come, he waited for them with the 
same rigidity of look and attitude. 

So, after a moment or two, Robert Avent on to describe in 
detail some of those individual cases of hardship and disease 
at Mile End, during the preceding year, which could be most 
clearly laid to the sanitary condition of the place. Filth, damp 
leaking roofs, foul floors, poisoned water—he traced to each 
some ghastly human ill, telling his stories with a nervous 
brevity, a suppressed fire, which would have burned them into 
the sense of almost any other listener. Not one of these woes 
but he and Catherine had tended with a sickening pity and 


284 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


labor of body and mind. That side-of it be kept rigidly out 
of sight. But all that he could hurl against the squire’s feel¬ 
ing, as it were, he gathered up, strangely conscious through it 
all of his own young, persistent yearning to right himself with 
this man, wliose mental history, as it lay chronicled in these 
rooms, had been to him, at a time of intellectual hunger, so 
stimulating, so enriching. 

But passion and reticence and hidden sympathy were alike 
lost upon th? squire. Before he paused Mr. Wendover had 
already risen restlessly from his chair, and from the rug was 
glowering down on his unwelcome visitor. 

Good heavens ! had he come home to be lectured in his own 
library by this fanatical slip of a parson ! As for his stories, 
the squire barely took the trouble to listen to them. 

Every popularity-hunting fool, with a passion for putting his 
hand into other people’s pockets, can tell pathetic stories; but 
it was intolerable that his scholar’s privacy should be at the 
mercy of one of the tribe. 

“ Mr. Elsmere,” he broke out at last with contemptuous 
emphasis, “I imagine it would have been better—infinitely 
better—to have spared both yourself and me the disagreeables 
of this interview. However, I am not sorry we should under¬ 
stand each other. I have lived a life which is at least double 
the length of yours in very tolerable peace and comfort. Tlie 
world has been good enough to me, and I for it, so far. I 
have been master in my own estate, and intend to remain so. 
As for the new-fangled ideas of a land-owner’s duty, with 
which your mind seems to be full,”—the scornful irritation of 
the tone was unmistakable—I have never dabbled in them, nor 
do I intend to begin now. I am like the rest of my kind; I 
have no money to chuck away in building schemes, in order that 
the rector of the parish may pose as the apostle of the agri¬ 
cultural laborer. That, however, is neither here nor there. 
What is to the purpose is, that my business aifairs are in the 
hands of a business man, deliberately chosen and approved by 
me, and that I have nothing to do with them. Nothing at all! ” 
he repeated with emphasis. ‘‘ It may seem to you very shock¬ 
ing. You may regard it as the object in life of the English 
land-owner to inspect the pig-stys and amend the habits of the 
English laborer. I don’t quarrel with the conception, I only 
ask you not to expect me to live up to it. I am a student first 
and foremost, and desire to be left to my books. Mr. Henslowe 
is there on purpose to protect my literary freedom. What he 
thinks desirable is good enough for me, as I have already in¬ 
formed you. I am sorry for it if his methods do not commend 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


285 


themselves to you. But I have yet to learn that the rector 
of the parish has an ex-officio right to interfere between a 
landlord and his tenants.” 

Robert kept his temper with some difficulty. After a pause 
he said, feeling desperately, however, that the suggestion was 
not likely to improve matters: 

“ If I were to take all the trouble and all the expense off 
your hands, Mr. Wendover, would it be impossible for you to 
authorize me to make one or two alterations most urgently 
necessary for the improvement of the Mile End cottages ? ” 

The squire burst into an angry laugh. 

“ I have never yet been in the habit, Mr. Elsmere, of doing 
my repairs by public subscription. You ask a little too much 
from an old man’s powers of adaptation.” 

Robert rose from his seat, his hand trembling as it rested on 
his walking-stick. 

“Mr Wendover,” he said, speaking at last with a flash of 
answering scorn in his young, vibrating voice, “ what I think 
you can not understand is that at any moment a human 
creature may sicken and die, poisoned by the state of your 
property, for which you—and nobody else—are ultimately 
responsible.” 

The squire shrugged his shoulders. 

“ So you say, Mr. Elsmere. If true, every person in such a 
condition has a remedy in his own hands. I force no one to 
remain on my property.” 

“The people who live there,” exclaimed Robert, “have 
neither home nor subsistence if they are driven out. Murewell 
is full—times bad—most of the people old.” 

“ And eviction ‘ a sentence of death,’ I suppose,” interrupted 
the squire, studying him with sarcastic eyes. “Well, I have 
no belief in a Gladstonian Ireland, still less in a Radical Eng¬ 
land. Supply and demand cause and effect, are enough for me. 
The Mile End cottages are out of repair, Mr. Elsmere, so Mr. 
Henslowe tells me, because the site is unsuitable, the type of 
cottage out of date. People live in them at their peril; I don’t 
pull them down, or rather,”—correcting himself with exasper¬ 
ating consistency—Mr. Henslowe doesn’t pull them down, 
because, like other men, I suppose, he dislikes an outcry. But 
if the population stays, it stays at its own risk. Now have I 
made myself plain ? ” 

The two men eyed each other. 

“ Perfectly plain,” said Robert quietly. “ Allow me to re¬ 
mind you, Mr. Wendover, that there are other matters than 
eviction capable of provoking an outcry.” 


286 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


“ As you please,” said the other indifferently. “I have no 
doubt I shall find myself in the newspapers before long. If so, I 
dare say I shall manage to put up with it. Society is made 
up of fanatics and the creatures they hunt. Ifl am to be 
hunted I shall be in good company.” 

Robert stood hat in hand, tormented with a dozen cross¬ 
currents of feeling. He was forcibly struck with the blind 
and comparatively motiveless pugnacity of the squire’s con¬ 
duct. There was an extravagance in it which for the first 
time recalled to him old Meyrick’s lucubrations. 

‘‘I have done no good, I see, Mr. Wendover,” he said at 
last, slowly. ‘‘ I wish I could have induced you to do an act 
of justice and mercy. I wish I could have made you think 
more kindly of myself. I have failed in both. It is useless 
to keep you any longer. Good-morning.” 

He bowed. The squire also bent forward. At that moment 
Robert caught sight beside his shoulder of an antique, stand¬ 
ing on the mantel-piece, which was a new addition to the room. 
It was a head of Medusa, and the frightful stony calm of it 
struck on Elsmere’s ruffled nerves with extraordinary force. 
It flashed across him that here was an apt symbol of that ab¬ 
sorbing and overgrown life of the intellect which blights the 
heart and chills the senses. And to that spiritual Medusa the 
man before him was not the first victim he had known. 

Possessed with the fancy, the young man made his way into 
the hall. Arrived there, he looked round with a kind of pas¬ 
sionate regret. “ Shall I ever see this again ?” he asked him¬ 
self. During the past twelve months his pleasure in the great 
house had been much more than sensuous. Within those walls 
his mind had grown, had reached to a fuller stature than be¬ 
fore, and a man loves, or should love, all that is associated 
with the maturing of his best self. 

He closed the ponderous doors behind him sadl}^ The mag¬ 
nificent pile, grander than ever in the sunny autumnal mist 
which enwrapped it, seemed to look after him as he walked 
away, mutely wondering that he should have allowed any¬ 
thing so trivial as a peasant’s grievance to come between him 
and its perfections. 

In the wooded lane outside the rectory gate he overtook 
Catherine. He gave her his report, and they walked on 
together, arm-in-arm, a very depressed pair. 

“ What shall you do next ?” she asked him. 

“ Make out the law of the matter,” he said, briefly. 

“If you get over the inspector,” said Catherine, anxiously, 
“I am tolerably certain Henslowe will turn out the people.” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


287 


He would not dare, Robert thought. At any rate, the law 
existed for such cases, and it was his bounden duty to call the 
inspector’s attention. 

Catherine did not see what good could be done thereby, and 
feared harm. But her wifely chivalry felt that he must get 
through his first serious practical trouble his own way. She 
saw that he felt himself distressingly young and inexperienced, 
and would not for the world have harassed him by over¬ 
advice. 

So she let him alone, and presently Robert threw the matter 
from him with a sigh. 

‘‘ Let it be a while,” he said, with a shake of his long frame. 
‘‘ I shall get morbid over it if I don’t mind. I am a selfish 
wretch, too. I know you have worries of your own, wifie.” 

And he took her hand under the trees and kissed it with a 
boyish tenderness. 

“Yes,” said Catherine, sighing, and then paused. “Rob¬ 
ert,” she burst out again, “ I am certain that man made love 
of a kind to Rose. He will never think of it again, but since 
the night before last she, to my mind, is simply a changed 
creature.” 

“ I don’t see it,” said Robert doubtfully. 

Catherine looked at him with a little angel scorn in her 
gray eyes. That men should make their seeing in such 
matters the measure of the visible ! 

“ You have been studying the squire, sir—I have been 
studying Rose.” 

Then she poured out her heart to him, describing the little 
signs of change and suffering her anxious sense had noted, in 
spite of Rose’s proud effort to keep all the world, but especially 
Catherine, at arm’s-length. And at the end her feeling swept 
her into a denunciation of Langham, which was to Robert like 
a breath from the past, from those stern hills wherein he met 
her first. The happiness of their married life had so softened 
or masked all her ruggedness of character that there was a 
certain joy in seeing those strong forces in her which had 
struck him first reappear. 

“ Of course I feel myself to blame,” he said, when she 
sto])ped. “ But how can one foresee, with such an inveterate 
hermit and recluse ? And I owed him—I owe him—so much.” 

“ I know,” said Catherine, but frowning still. It probably 
seemed to her that that old debt had been more than effaced. 

“You will have to send her to Berlin,” said Elsmere, after 
a pause. “ You must play off her music against this unlucky 
feeling. If it exists it is your only chance.” 


288 


EGBERT ELSyfERE. 


‘‘ Yes, she must go to Boi-liii,” said Catlierine, s^o\v^3^ 

Tiien presently slie looked np, a tiasli of exquisite feeling 
breaking up the delicate i-esolution of the face. 

I am not sad about that, Robert. Oh, how you liave 
widened my world for.me ! ” 

Suddenly that hour in Marrisdale came back to her. They 
were in the wood-path. She crept inside her husband’s arm 
and put up her face to him, swept away by an overmastering 
impulse of self-humiliating love. 

The next day Robert walked over to the little market town 
of Churton, saw the discreet and long established solicitor of 
the place, and got from him a complete account of the present 
state of the rural sanitary law. The hi’st step clearly was to 
move the sanitary inspector ; if that failed for any reason, 
then any bond fide inhabitant had an a])peal to the local sani¬ 
tary authority, viz., the board of guardians. Robert walked 
home pondering his information, and totally ignorant that 
Henslowe, who was always at Churton on market-days, had 
been in the market-place at the moment when the rector’s tall 
figure had disappeared within Mr. Dunstan’s office door. That 
door was unpleasantly known to the agent in connection with 
some energetic measures for raising money he had been lately 
under the necessity of employing, and it had a way of attract¬ 
ing his e^^es by means of the fascination that often attaches 
to disagreeable objects. 

In the evening Rose was sitting listlessly in the drawing¬ 
room. Catherine was not there, so her novel was on her lap, 
and her eyes were staring intently into a world whereof they 
only had the key. Suddenly there was a ring at the bell. 
The servant came, and there were several voices and a sound 
of much shoe-scraping. Then the swing-door leading to the 
study opened and Elsmere and Catherine came out. Elsmere 
sto])ped with an exclamation. 

His visitors were two men from Mile End. One was old 
iMilsom, more sallow and })alsied than ever. As he stood bent 
almost double, his old knotted hand resting for support on the 
table beside him, everything in the little hall seemed to shake 
Avith him. The other Avas Sharland, the handsome father of 
the twins, AAdiose Avife had been fed by Catherine Avith every 
imaginable delicacy since Robert’s last visit to the hamlet. 
Even his strong youth had begun to show signs of premature 
decay. The rolling gypsy eyes Avere growing sunken, the 
limbs dragged a little. 

They had come to implore the rector to let Mile End alone. 
HensloAve had been over there in the afternoon, and had given 


.ROBERT ELSMERE. 


289 


them all very plainly to understand that if Mr. Elsmere med¬ 
dled any more they would all be turned out at a week’s notice 
to shift as they could. “ And if you don’t find Thurston 
Common nice lying this Aveather, with the Avinter coming on, 
you’ll knoAV Avho to thank for it,” the agent had Hung behind 
him as he rode off. 

Robert turned white. Rose, Avatching the little scene with 
listless eyes, saw him towering over the group like an em¬ 
bodiment of Avrath and pity. 

“ If they turn us out, sir,” said old Milsorn Avistfully, look¬ 
ing up at hhsmere Avith blear eyes, “ there’ll be nothing left 
but the house for us old ’uns. Wliy, Lor’ bless you, sir, it’s 
not so bad but Ave can make shift.” 

“ You, Milsorn ! ” cried Robert, “ and you’ve just all but 
lost your grandchild ! And you know your Avife’ll never be the 
same Avoman since that bout of fever in the spring. And—” 

His quick eyes ran over the old man’s broken frame with a 
Avorld of indignant meaning in them. 

“Ay,, ay, sir,” said Milsoni, unmoved. “But if it isn’t 
fevers, it’s summat else. I can make a shilling or two where 
I be, speshally in the first part of the year, in the liasket-work, 
and my Avife she goes charing up at Mr. Carter’s farm, and 
]Mr. Dodson, him at the further farm, he do give us a bit some¬ 
times. Ef you git us turned aAvay it Avill lie a bad day’s Avoi'k 
for all on us, sir, you may take my word on it.” 

“ And ni}^ wife so ill, Mr. Elsmere,” said Sharland, “ and all 
those childer ! I can’t Avalk three miles further to ni}^ Avork, 
3Ir. Elsmere, I can’t nohow. I haven’t got the legs for it. 
Let un be, sir. AYe’ll rub along.” 

Robert tried to argue the matter. 

If they Avould but stand by him he Avould fight the matter 
through, and they should not suffer, if he had to get up a pub¬ 
lic subscription, or support them out of his own ])Ocket all the 
Avinter. A bohl front, and Mr. Ilenslowe must give way. The 
law on their side, and every laborer in Surrey Avould be the 
better off for their refusal to be housed like pigs and be 
poisoned like vermin. 

In vain. There is an inexhaustible store of cautious endur¬ 
ance in the poor against which the keenest reformer constantly 
'throws himself in vain. Elsmere Avas beaten. The two men 
got his Avord, and shuffled off back to their jiestilential hovels, 
a pathetic content beaming on each faoe. 

Catherine and Robert Avent back into the study. Rose 
heard her brother-in-hiAv’s passionate sigh as the door SAVung 
belli ml them. 


290 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


‘‘Defeated!” she said to herself, with a curious accent. 
“Well, everybody must have his turn. Robert has been too 
successful in his life, I think. You wretch ! ” she added, after 
a minute, laying lier briglit head down on the book before her. 

Next morning liis wife found Elsmere after breakfast busily 
packing a case of books in the study. They were books from 
the Hall library, which so far had been for months the insep¬ 
arable companions of his historical work. 

Catherine stood and watched him sadly. 

“ Must you, Robert ? ” 

“ I won’t be beholden to that man for anything an hour 
longer than I can help,” he answered her; 

When the packing was nearly finished he came up to where 
she stood in the open window. 

“Things won’t be as easy for us in the future, darling,” he 
said to her. “ A rector with both squire and agent against 
him is rather heavily handicapped. We must make up our 
minds to that.” 

“ I have no great fear,” she said, looking at him proudly. 

“ Oh, well—nor I—perhaps,” he admitted, after a moment. 
“ We can hold our own. But I wish—oh, I v/ish ”—and he 
laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder—“ I could have made 
friends with the squire.” 

Catherine looked less responsive. 

“ As squire, Robert, or as Mr. Wendover ? ” 

“As both, of course, but specially as Mr. Wendover.” 

“ We, can do without his friendship,” she said, with energy. 

Robert gave a great stretch, as though to work off his regrets. 

“ Ah, but,” he said, half to himself, as his arms dropped, 
“ if you are just filled with the hunger to Jcnow^ the people 
who know as much as the squire become very interesting to 
you.” 

Catherine did not answer. But probably her heart went out 
once more in protest against a knowledge that was to her but 
a form of revolt against the awful powers of man’s destiny. 

“ Plowever, here go his books,” said Robert. 

Two days later Mrs. Leyburn and Agnes made their appear¬ 
ance, Mrs. Leyburn all in a fiutter concerning the event over 
which, in her own opinion, she had come to preside. In her 
gentle fluid mind all impressions were short-lived. She had 
forgotten how she had brought up her own babies, but Mrs. 
Thornburgh, who had never had any, had filled her full of 
nursery lore. She sat retailing a host of second-hand hints and 
instructions to Catherine, who would every now and then lay 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 


291 


her hand smiling on her mother’s knee, well ])]eased to see the 
hush of pleasure on the pretty old face, and ready, in her ])a- 
tient tilial way, to let liei’self he experimented on to the ut¬ 
most, if it did but make the poor foolisli tiling hap])^. 

Then came a night when every soul in the quiet rectory, 
even hot, smarting Rose, was {lossessed by one thought througli 
many terrible hours, and one only—the thought of Catherine’s 
safety. It was strange and unexpected, but Catherine, the 
most normal and healthy of women, had a liard struggle for 
lier own life and her child’s, and it was not till tlie gray 
autumn morning, after a day and night whicli left a permanent 
mark on Robert, that he was summoned at last, and with the 
sense of one emerging from the black gulfs of terror, received 
from his wife’s languid hand the tiny lingers of his hrst- 
born. 

The days that followed were full of emotion for these two 
people, who were perhaps always overserious, oversensitive. 
Tliey had no idea of minimizing the great common experiences 
of life. Both of them were really simple, brought up in old- 
fashioned simple ways, easily touched, responsive to all that 
liigh spiritual education which Hows from the familiar incidents 
of the human story, approached poetically and passionately. 
As the young husband sat in the quiet of his wife’s room, the 
occasional restless movements of the small brown head against 
lier breast causing the only sound perceptible in the country 
silence, he felt all the dee]^, familiar currents of liuman feeling 
sweeping through him—love, reverence, thanksgiving—and all 
the walls of the soul, as it were, expanding and enlarging as 
they passed. 

Resj)onsive creature that he Avas, the ex])erience of these 
days was hardly happiness. It went too deep ; it brought 
him too poignantly near to all that is most real and therefore 
most tragic in life. 

Catherine’s recovery also was slower than might have been 
expected, considering her constitutional soundness, and for the 
iirst week, after that faint moment of joy when her child was 
laid upon lier arm, and she saw her husband’s quivering face 
above lier, there Avas a kind of depression hovering over her. 
Robert felt it, and felt too that all his devotion could not 
soothe it away. At last she said to him one evening, in the 
encroaching September tAvilight, speaking Avith a sudden 
hurrying vehemence, wholly unlike herself, as though a bar¬ 
rier of reserve had giv'en Avay : 

Robert, I can not put it out of my liead. I can not forget 
it, the imhi of the world! 


292 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


He shut the book he was reading, her hand in his, and bent 
over her with questioning eyes. 

“ It seems,” she went on with that difficulty which a strong 
nature always feels in self-revelation, ‘‘ to take the joy even 
out of our love—and the child. " I feel ashamed almost that 
mere physical pain should have laid such hold on me—and yet 
I can’t get away from it. It’s not for m^^self,” and she smiled 
faintly at him. “ Comparatively I had so little to bear ! But 
I know now for the first time what physical pain may mean— 
and I never knew before. I lie thinking, Robert, about all 
creatures in pain—workmen crushed by machineiy, or soldiers 
—or poor things in hospitals—above all of women ! Oh, when 
I get well, how I will take care of the women here I What 
women must suffer even here in out-of-the-way cottages—no 
doctor, no kind nursing, all blind agony and struggle. And 
women in London in dens like those Mr. Newcome got into, 
degraded, forsaken, ill-treated, the thought of the child onl}^ 
an extra horror and burden ! And the pain all the time so 
merciless, so cruel—no escape ! Oh, to give all one is, or ever 
can be, to comforting ! And yet the great sea of it one can 
never touch ! It is a nightmare—I am weak still, I suppose; 
I don’t know myself ; l)ut I can see nothing but jarred, tor¬ 
tured creatures everywhere. All my own joys and comforts 
seem to lift me selfishly above the common lot.” 

She stopped, her large, gray-blue eyes dim with tears, try¬ 
ing once more for that habitual self-restraint which physical 
weakness had shaken. 

“You are weak,” he said, caressing her, “ and that destroys 
for a time the normal balance of things. It is true, darling, 
but we are not meant to see it always so clearl}^ God knows 
we could not bear it if we did.” 

“And to think,” she said, shuddering a little, “that there 
are men and women who in the face of it can still refuse 
Christ and the Cross, can still say this life is all! How can 
they live—how dare they live ?” 

Then he saw that not only man’s pain, but man’s defiance, 
had been haunting her, and lie guessed what persons and 
memories had been Hitting through her mind. But he dared 
not talk lest she should exhaust herself. Presently, seeing a 
volume of Augustine’s “ Confessions,” her favorite liook, lying 
beside her, he took it up, turning over the pages, and weaving 
passages together as they caught his eye. 

“ Speak to me, for Thy compassion’s sake, O Lord my God, 
and tell me what art Thou to me ! Say unto my soul, ‘ I am 
thy salvation ! ’ Speak it that I may hear. Behold tlie ears 


ROBICUT ELSMERB. 


2113 

of my lieart, 0 Lord ; open them and say unto my soul, ‘ I am 
tliy salvation ! ’ I will follow after this voice of Thine, I will 
lay hold on Thee. The temple of my soul, wherein Thou 
shouldest enter, is narrow, do Thou enlarge it. It falleth into 
ruins—do Thou rebuild it ! . . . Woe to that bold soul which 
hopeth, if it do but let Thee go, to iind something better than 
Thee ! It turneth hither and thither, on this side and on 
that, and all things are hard and bitter unto it. For Thou 
only art rest ! . . . Whithei-soever the soul of man tui-neth it 
hndeth sorrow, excej)t only in Thee. Fix there, then, thy 
i-estingrplace, my soul ! Lay uj) in II im whatever thou hast 
received from Him. Commend to the keeping of the Truth 
whatever the Tiuith hath given thee, and thou shalt lose 
notliing. And thy dead things shall revive and thy weak 
things shall be made whole ! ” 

She listened, appropriating and clinging to every word, till 
the nervous clasp of the long, delicate fingers relaxed, her head 
<Iropped a little, gently, against the head of the child, and 
tii’ed with much feeling she slej)t. 

Robert slipped away and strolled out into the garden in the 
fast-gathering darkness. Ilis mind was full of that intense 
S})iritual life of Catherine’s which in its wonderful self-con¬ 
tainedness and strength was always a marvel, sometimes a 
reproach, to him. Beside her, he seemed to himself’ a light 
creature, drawn hither and thither by this interest, and by 
that, tangled in the fleeting shows of things—the toy and })lay- 
tliing of circumstance. He thought ruefully and humbly, as 
he wandered on through the dusk, of his own lack of inward¬ 
ness : “ Everything divides me from Thee ! ” he could have 
cried in St. Augustine’s manner. “Books and friends, and 
woi'k—all seem to hide Thee from me. Why am I so passion¬ 
ate for this and that, for all these sections and fragments of 
d'hee ? Oh, for the One, the all! Fix there thy resting-place, 
my soul ! ” 

And presently, after this cry of self-reproach, he turned to 
muse on that intuition of the world’s pain which had been 
troubling Catherine, shrinking from it even more than she 
had shrunk from it, in proportion as his nature was inor(‘ im¬ 
aginative than hers. And Christ the only clew, the only 
remedy—no other anywhere in this vast universe, where all 
men are under sentence of death, where the whole en'ation 
groaneth and travaileth in ]>aiTi together until now. 

And yet what countless generations of men had borne their 
pain, knowing nothing of the one Healer. He thought of 
Buddhist patience and Buddhist charity ; of the long centuries 


294 


ROBEliT ELSMERE. 


during which Chaldean or Persian or Egyptian lived, suffered, 
and died, trusting the gods they knew. And how many other 
generations, nominally children of the Great Ilojje, had used it 
as the mere instrument of passion or of hate, cursing in the 
name of love, destroying in the name of pit}\ For how much 
of the world’s pain was not Christianity itself responsible ? 
Ills thouglits recurred with a kind of anguished perplexity to 
some of the problems stirred in him of late by his historical 
1‘eading. The strifes and feuds and violences of the early 
church returned to weigh upon him—the hair-splitting super¬ 
stition, the selhsh passion for power. He recalled Gibbon’s 
lamentation over the age of the Antonines, and ]\lommsen’s 
grave doubt whether, taken as a whole, the area once covered 
by the Roman Empire can be said to be substantially happier 
now than in the days of Severus. 

O (iorrxiptio optiini! That men should have been so little 
affected by that shining ideal of the new Jerusalem, “ descend¬ 
ed out of Heaven from God,” into their very midst—that the 
print of the ‘‘ blessed feet ” along the world’s highway should 
have been so often buried in the sands of cruelty and fraud ! 

The September wind blew about him as he strolled through 
the darkening column, set thick with great bushes of somber 
juniper among the yellowing fern, which stretched away on the 
left-hand side of the road leading to the Hall. He stood and 
watched the masses of restless discordant cloud which the sun¬ 
set had left behind it, thinking the while of Mr. Gre}^, of 
his assertions and his denials. Certain phrases of his wliich 
Robert had heard drop from him on one or tAvo rare occasions 
during the later stages of his Oxford life ran through his head. 
“ J’he Fairy-Tale of Christianity,” “ The Origins of Christian 
Mythology.” He could recall, as the Avords rose in his mem¬ 
ory, the simplicity of the rugged face, and the melancholjr 
mingled Avith fire aaJucIi had always marked the great tutor’s 
sayings about religion. 

“ Fairy Tale ! ” Could any reasonable man Avatch a life like 
Catherine’s and believe that nothing but a delusion lay at the 
heart of it ? And as he asked the question he seemed to hear 
IVIr. Grey’s ansAA^er : “All religions are true, and all are false. 
In them all, more or less visibly, man grasps at the one thing 
needful—self forsaken, God laid hold of. The spirit in them 
all is the same, answers eternally to reality ; it is but the letter, 
the fashion, the imagery, that are relative and changing.” 

He turned and Avalked homeAvard, struggling Avith a host of 
tempestuous ideas as swift and A^arying as the autumn clouds 
hurrying overhead. And then, through a break in a line of 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


295 


trees, he caught sight of the tower and chancel window of the 
little church. In an instant he had a vision of early summer 
mornings—dewy, perfumed, silent, save for the birds, and all 
the soft stir of rural birth and growth, of a chancel fragrant 
with many flowers, of a distant church with scattered flgures, 
of the kneeling form of his wife close beside him, himself bend¬ 
ing over her, the sacrament of the Lord’s death in his hand. 
The emotion, the intensity, the absolute self-surrender of in¬ 
numerable such moments in the past—moments of a common 
faith, a common self-abasement—came flooding back upon 
him. With a movement of joy and penitence he threw him¬ 
self at the feet of Catherine’s master and his own : ^^Fix there 
thy resting-place, my soul!'*'' 

CHAPTER XX. 

Catheeixe’s later convalescence dwelt in her mind in after 
years as a time of peculiar softness and peace. Her baby-girl 
throve ; Robert had driven the squire and Henslowe out of his 
mind, and was all eagerness as to certain negotiations with a 
famous naturalist for a lecture at the village club. At Mile 
End, as though to put the rector in the wrong, serious illness 
had for the time disappeared ; and Mrs. Leyburn’s mild chatter, 
as she gently poked about the house and garden, went out in 
Catherine’s pony-carriage, inspected Catherine’s stores, and 
hovered over Catherine’s babe, had a constantly cheering effect 
on the still languid mother. Like all theorists, especially those 
at second-hand, Mrs. Leyburn’s maxims had been very much 
routed by the event. The babe had ailments she did not under¬ 
stand, or it developed likes and dislikes she had forgotten 
existed in babies, and Mrs. Leyburn was nonplused. She would 
sit with it on her lap, anxiously studying its peculiarities. 
She was sure it squinted, that its back was weaker than other 
babies, that it cried more than hers had ever done. She loved 
to be plaintive ; it would have seemed to her unladylike to be 
too cheerful, even over a first grandchild. 

Agnes meanwhile made herself practically useful, as was her 
way, and she did almost more than anybody to beguile Cath¬ 
erine’s recovery by her hours of Long Whindale chat. She had 
no passionate feeling about the place and the people as Cath¬ 
erine had, but she was easily content, and she had a good 
wholesome feminine curiosity as to the courtings and weddings 
and buryings of the human beings about her. So she would 
sit and chat, working the while with the quickest, neatest of 
fingers, till Catherine knew as much about Jenny Tyson’s 
Whinborough lover, and Farmer Tredall’s troubles with his 


296 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


son, and the way in which that odious woman Molly Redgold 
bullied her little consumptive husband, as Agnes knew, which 
was saying a good deal. 

About themselves Agnes was frankness itself. 

“ Since you went,” she would say with a shrug, I keep the 
coach steady, perhaps, but Rose drives, and we shall have to 
go where she takes us. By the way, Cathie, what have you 
been doing to her here ? She is not a bit like herself. I don’t 
generally mind being snubbed. It amuses her and doesn’t li iirt 
me ; and, of course, I know I am meant to be her foil. But, 
really, sometimes she is too bad even for me.” 

Catherine sighed, but held her peace. Like all strong per¬ 
sons, she kept things very much to herself. It only made 
vexations more real to talk about them. But she and Agnes 
discussed the winter and Berlin. 

‘‘ You had better let her go,” said Agnes, significantly ; 
she will go anyhow.” 

A few days afterward Catherine, opening the drawing-room 
door unexpectedly, came upon Rose sitting idly at the piano, 
her hands resting ou the keys, and her great gray eyes strain¬ 
ing out of her white face with an expression which sent the 
sister’s heart into her shoes. 

“ How you steal about, Catherine ! ” cried the player, getting 
up and shutting the piano. “ I declare you are just like Mil¬ 
lais’s Gray Lady in that ghostly gown.” 

Catherine came swiftly across the floor. She had just left 
her child,, and the sweet dignity of motherhood was in her step, 
her look. She came and threw her arms round the girl. 

“ Rose, dear, I have settled it all with mamma. The money 
can be managed, and you shall go to Berlin for the winter 
when you like.” 

She drew herself back a little, still Avith her arms round 
Rose’s waist, and looked at her smiling, to see hoAv she took it. 

Rose had a strange movement of irritation. She drew her¬ 
self out of Catherine’s grasp. 

I don’t know that I had settled on Berlin,” she said coldly. 
‘A^ery possible Leipsic would be better.” 

Catherine’s face fell. 

“ Whichever you like, dear. I have been thinking about it 
ever since that day you spoke of it—you remember—and now 
I have talked it over with mamma. If she can’t manage all 
the expense we will help. Oh, Rose,” and she came nearer 
again, timidly, her eyes melting, “ I know we haven’t under¬ 
stood each other. I have been ignorant, I think, and narrow. 
But I meant it for the best, dear—I did—” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


297 

Her voice failed lier, but in lier look there seemed to be writ¬ 
ten the liistory of all the prayers and yearnings of her youth 
over the wayward cliild who had been her jo}^ and tor¬ 

ment. Rose could not but meet that look—its nobleness, its 
liumble surrender. 

Suddenly two large tears rolled down her cheeks. She 
dashed them away im])atiently., 

“ I am not a bit well,” she said, as though in irritable excuse 
both to herself and Catherine. “ I believe I have had a head¬ 
ache for a fortnight.” 

And then she put her arms down on a table near and hid her 
face upon them. She was one bundle of jarring nerves—sore, 
})oor passionate child, that she was betraying herself ; sorer 
still that, as she told herself, Catherine was sending her to 
llerlin as a consolation. When girls have love-troubles the 
first thing their elders do is to look for a diversion. She felt 
sick and humiliated. Catherine had been talking her over with 
the family, she supposed. 

Meanwhile Catherine stood by her tenderly, stroking her hair 
and sajdng soothing things. 

“I am sure you will be happy at Berlin, Rose. And you 
mustn’t leave me out of your life, dear, though I am so stu|)id 
and unmusical. You must write to me about all you do. AYe 
must begin a now time. Oh, I feel so guilty sometimes,” she 
went on, falling into a low intensity of voice that startled 
Rose, and made her look hurriedly up. “I fought against 
your music, I suppose, because I thought it was devouring 
yon—leaving no room for—for religion—for God. I was 
jealous of it for Christ’s sake. And all the time T was blun¬ 
dering ! Oh, Rose,” and she sank on her knees beside the chair, 
resting her head against the girl’s shoulder, “ pa])a charged me 
to make you love God, and 1 torture myself with thinking 
that, instead, it has been my doing, my foolish, clumsy doing, 
that vou have come to think religion dull and hard. Oh, my 
darling, if I could make amends—if I could get you not to 
love your art less but to love it in God ! Christ is the first 
reality ; all things else are real and lovely in him. Oh, I 
liave been frightening 3^011 away from him ! X ought to have 
drawn 3^011 near. I have been so—so silent, so shut up, I have 
never tried to make you feel what it was kept me at Ids feet ! 
Oh, Rose, darling, you think the world real, and pleasure and 
enjovment real. But if I could have made 3^011 see and know 
the things I have seen up in tlie mountains—among the poor, 
the dying—3^011 would have felt him saving redeeming, in¬ 
terceding, as I did. Oh, then ^ou must, jow would have 


298 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


known that Clirist only is real, that onr joys can only truly 
exist in him. I should have been more open—more faitliful— 
more humble.” 

She paused with a long, quivering sigh. Rose suddenly 
lifted lierself, and they fell into each other’s arms. 

Rose, shaken and excited, thought of course of tliat night at 
Burwood, when she had won leave to go to JManchester. Tliis 
scene was the sequel to that—the next stage in one and the 
same process. Her feeling was much the same as that of the 
naturalist who comes close to any of the hidden operations of 
life. She had come near to Catherine’s S])ii-it in the gi’owing. 
Beside that sweet expansion, how poor and feverish and eartli- 
stnined the poor child felt herself ! 

But there were many currents in Rose—many things striv¬ 
ing for the mastery. She had kissed Catherine once or twice, 
then she drew herself back suddenly, looking into the other’s 
face. A great wave of feeling rushed u]) and broke. 

“ Catherine, could you ever have married a man that did not 
believe in Christ ?” 

She dung the question out—a kind of morbid curiosity, a 
wild wish to find an outlet of some sort for things pent up in 
her, driving her on. 

Catherine started. But she met Rose’s half-frowning eyes 
steadily. 

“ Never, Rose ! To me it would not be marriage.” 

The cliild’s face lost its softness. She drew one hand away. 

“What have we to do with it?” she cried. “ Each one for 
himself.” 

“ Jbit marriage makes two one,” said Catherine, pale, but 
Avith a firm clearness. “And if husband and wife are only 
one in body and estate, not one in soul, whjq Avho that believes 
in the soul Avould accept such a bond, endure such a miserable 
second best ? ” 

She rose. But though her voice had recovered all its energy, 
her attitude, her look was still tenderness, still yearning itself. 

“ Religion does not fill up the soul,” said Rose slowly. Then • 
she added, carelessly, a passionate red fi^ying into her cheek 
against her will : “ However, I can not imagine any question 
that interests me personally less. I Avas curious what you 
Avould say.” 

And she too got up, dra wing her hand lightly along the key¬ 
board of the ]fiano. Her pose had a kind of defiance in it ; her 
knit brows foi’bade Catherine to ask questions. Cathei’ine stood 
irresolute. Should she throAV herself on her sister, implor¬ 
ing her to speak, opening her oavu heart on the subject of this 


ROBEliT ELSMERE. 


299 


wild, unhappy fancy for a man who would never think again 
of the child he had played with ? 

But the north-country dread of words, of speech that only 
defines and magnifies, prevailed. Let there he no words, but 
let her love and watch. 

So, after a moment’s pause, she began in a different tone 
upon the inquiries she had been making, the arrangements 
that would be wanted for this musical winter. Rose was 
almost listless at first. A stranger would have thought she 
was being persuaded into something against her will. But 
she could not keep it up. The natural instinct reasserted 
itself, and she was soon planning and deciding as shai‘ply, and 
with as much young omniscience as usual. 

By the evening it was settled. Mrs. Leyburn, much bewil¬ 
dered, asked Catherine, doubtfully, the last thing at night, 
whether she wanted Rose to be a professional. Catherine ex¬ 
claimed. 

“ But, my dear,” said the widow, staring pensively into her 
bedroom fire, “ what’s she to do with all this music ?” Then 
after a second she added, half severely : “ I don’t believe her 
father would have liked it ; I don’t, indeed, Catherine ! ” 

Poor Catherine smiled and sighed in the background, but 
made no reply. 

“ However, she never looks so pretty as when she’s playing 
the violin—never ! ” said Mrs. Leyburn presently in the dis¬ 
tance, with a long breath of satisfaction. ‘‘ She’s got such a 
lovely hand and arm, Catherine ! They’re prettier than 
mine, and even your father used to notice mine.” 

“ Even.'''' The word had a little sound of bitterness. In 
spite of all his love, had the gentle, puzzle-headed woman 
found her unearthly husband often very hard to live with ? 

Rose meanwhile was sitting up in bed, with her hands round 
her knees, dreaming. So she had got her heart’s desire ! There 
did not seem to be much joy in the getting, but that was the' 
way of things, one was told. She knew she should hate the 
Germans—great, bouncing, overfed, sentimental creatures ! 

Then her thoughts ran into the future. After six months— 
yes, by April—she would be home, and Agnes and her mother 
could meet her in London. 

London. Ah, it was London she was thinking of all the 
time, not Berlin ! She could not stay in the present; or, 
rather, the Rose of the present went straining to the Rose of 
the future, asking to be righted, to be avenged. 

“ I will learn—I will learn—I will learn fast—many things 
besides music ! ” she said to lierspil’ feverishly. By April I 


300 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


shall be 7 nuch cleverer. Oh, I \voii’t be a fool so easily". 
We shall be sure to meet, of course. But he shall find out 
that it was only a cJdld, only a silly, soft-lieartecl baby he played 
with down here. I sha’n’t care for him in the least, of course 
not, not after six months. I don’t mecm to. And I will make 
him know it—oh, I will, though he is so wise, and so much 
older, and mounts on such stilts when he pleases ! ” 

So once more Rose tiling her defiance at fate. But when 
Catherine came along the passage an hour later she heard low 
sounds from Rose’s room, which ceased abruptly as her step 
drew near. The elder sister paused ; her eyes tilled with tears ; 
her hand closed indignantly. Then she came closer, all but 
went in, thought better of it, and moved away. If there is 
any truth in brain-waves, Langham should have slept rest¬ 
lessly that night. 

Ten days later an escort had been found, all preparations 
had been made, and Rose was gone. 

Mrs. Leyburn and Agnes lingered awhile, and then they too 
departed under an engagement to come back after Christmas 
for a long stay, that Mrs, Leyburn might cheat the northern 
spring a little. 

So husband and wife were alone again. ITow they relished 
their solitude ! Catherine took up many threads of work which 
her months of comparative weakness had forced her to let drop. 
She taught vigoroush^ in the school; in the afternoons, so far as 
her child would let her, she carried her tender presence and her 
practical knowledge of nursing to the sick and feeble; and on 
two evenings in the week she and Robert threw open a little 
room there was on the ground-floor between the study and the 
dining-room to the women and girls of the village, as a sort of 
drawing-room, llard-woi'ked mothers would come, who had 
|)ut their fretful babes to sleep, and given their lords to eat, and 
iiad just energy left, while the eldest daughter watched, and 
the men were at the club or the Blue Boar, to put on a clean 
a|)ron and climb the short hill to the rectory. Once there, there 
was nothing to think of for an hour but the bright room, Cath¬ 
erine’s kind face, the rector’s jokes, and the illustrated papers 
or the photographs that were spread out for them to look at 
if they would. The girls loved to come, because Catherine 
could teach them a simple dress-making, and was clever in 
catching stray persons to set them singing ; and because Mr. 
Elsrnere read exciting stories, and because nothing anv one of 
them ever told Mrs. Elsmere was forgotten by her, or failed 
to interest her. Any of her social eipials of the neighborhood 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


301 


would have hardly recognized the reserved and stately Cath¬ 
erine on these occasions. Here she felt lierself at home, at 
ease. She would never, indeed, have Robert’s pliancy, his 
quick divination, and for some time after her transplanting the 
north-countrywoman had found it very diHicult to suit herself 
to a new shade of local character. Rut she was learning from 
Robert every day ; she watched him among the ])oor, recog¬ 
nizing all his gifts with an humble intensity of admiring love, 
which said little but treasured everything, and for herself her 
inward happiness and peace shone thi'ough her quiet ways, 
making her the mother and friend of all about her. 

As for Robert, he, of course, was living at high pressure all 
round. Outside his sermons and his school, his Natural History 
Club had perhaps most of his heart, and the ])assion for sci¬ 
ence, little continuous work as he was able to give it, grew on 
him more and more. He ke])t up as best he could, working 
with one hand, so to speak, when he could not si)are two, and 
in his long rambles over moor and hill gathering in with his 
quick eye a harvest of local fact wherewith to feed their knowl¬ 
edge and his own. 

The mornings he always spent at work among his books, the 
afternoons in endless tramps over the parish, sometimes alone, 
sometimes with Catherine ; and in the evenings, if Catherine 
was “at home ” twice a week to womankind, he had his nights 
when his study became the haunt and prey of half the boys in 
the place, who were fi’ee of everything, as soon as he had 
taught them to respect his books, and not to taste his medi¬ 
cines ; other nights when he was lecturing or story-telling in 
the club or in some outlying hamlet ; or others again, when 
with Catherine beside him he would sit trying to think some 
of that religious passion which burned in both their hearts 
into clear words or striking illustrations for his sermons. 

Then his choir was much upon his mind. He knew nothing 
about music, nor did Catherine ; their efforts made Rose laugh 
irreverently when she got their letters at Berlin. But Rol)ert 
believed in a choir chiefly as an excellent social and centraliz¬ 
ing instrument. There had been none in ]\li-. Preston’s day. 
Jfe was determined to have one, and a good one, and by sheer 
enei-gy he succeeded, delighting in his bnyish way over the 
op]K>sition some of his novelties excited among the older and 
more stiff-backed inhabitants. 

“ Let them talk,” he would say brightly to Catherine. 
“ d’hey will come round ; and talk is good. Anything to 
make them think, to stir the pool ! ” 

Of course that old problem of the agricultural laborer 


302 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


weighed upon him—his grievances, his wants. He went about 
pondering the English land system, more than half inclined 
one day to sink part of his capital in a peasant-'proprietor ex¬ 
periment, and ingulfed the next in all the moral and economi¬ 
cal objection to the French system. Land for allotments, at 
any rate, he had set his heart on. But in this direction, as in 
many others, the way was barred. All the land in the parish 
was the squire’s, and not one inch of the squire’s land would 
Henslowe let young Elsmere have anything to do Avith if he 
knew it. He would neither repair nor enlarge the Workmen’s 
Institute ; and he had a way of forgetting the squire’s custom¬ 
ary subscriptions to parochial objects, always paid through 
hini, which gave him much food for chuckling whenever he 
passed Elsmere in the country lanes. The man’s coarse inso¬ 
lence and mean hatred made themselves felt at every turn, be¬ 
smirching and embittering. 

Still it was very true that neither Henslowe nor the squire 
could do Robert much harm. His hold on the parish was visi¬ 
bly strengthening ; his sermons were not only filling the church 
with his own parishioners, but attracting hearers from the dis¬ 
tricts round Murewell, so that even on these winter Sundays 
there was almost always a sprinkling of strange faces among 
the congregation ; and his position in the county and diocese 
was becoming every month more honorable and important. 
The gentry about showed them much kindness, and Avould have 
shown them much hospitality if they had been alloAved. But 
though Robert had nothing of the ascetic about him, and liked 
the society of his equals as much as most good-tempered and 
vivacious people do, he and Catherine decided that for the pres¬ 
ent they had no time to spare for visits and county society. 
Still, of course, there were many occasions on which the rou¬ 
tine of their life brought them across their neighbors, and it 
began to be pretty Avidely recognized that Elsmere Avas a 
young felloAV of unusual promise and intelligence, that his Avife 
too was remarkable, and that between them they were likely 
to raise the standard of clerical effort considerably in their 
part of Surrey. 

All the factors of this life—his Avork, his influence, his recov¬ 
ered health, the lavish beauty of the country—Elsmere enjoyed 
with all his heart. But at the root of all there lay what gave 
value and savor to everything else—that exquisite home-life of 
theirs, that tender, triple bond of husband, Avife and child. 

Catherine, coming home tired from teaching or visiting, 
would find her step quickening as she reached the gate of the 
rectory, and the sense of delicious possession Avaking up in her, 


HOBEET EL8MERE. 


303 


which is one of the first fruits of motherhood. There, at the 
window, between the lamp-light behind and the winter dusk 
outside, would be the child in its nurse’s arms, little wondering, 
motiveless smiles passing over the tiny puckered face that was 
so oddly like Robert already. And afterward, in the fire light¬ 
ed nursery, with the bath in front of the high fender, and all 
the necessaries of baby life beside it, she would go through 
those functions which mothers love and linger over, let the 
kicking, dimpled creature principally concerned protest as it 
may against the over-refinements of civilization. Then, when 
the little restless voice was stilled, and the cradle left silent in 
the darkened room, there would come the short watching for 
Robert, his voice, his kiss, their simple meal together, a mo¬ 
ment of rest, of laughter and chat, before some fresh effort 
claimed them. Every now and then—white-letter days—there 
would drop on them a long evening together. Then out would 
come one of the- few books—Dante or Virgil or Milton—which 
had entered into the fiber of Catherine’s strong nature. The 
two heads would draw close over them, or Robert would take 
some thought of hers as a textj and spout away from the hearth¬ 
rug, watching all the while for her smile, her look of assent. 
Sometimes, late at night, when there was a sermon on his mind, 
he would dive into his pocket for his Greek Testament and 
make her read, partly for the sake of teaching her—for she 
knew some Greek and longed to know more—but mostly that 
he might get from her some of that garnered wealth of spirit¬ 
ual experience which he adored in her. They would go from 
verse to verse, from thought to thought, till suddenly perhaps 
the tide of feeling would rise, and while the wind swept round 
the house, and the owls hooted in the elms, they would sit 
hand in hand, lost in love and faith—Christ near them—Etern¬ 
ity, warm with God, enwrapping them. 

So much for the man of action, the husband, the philanthro¬ 
pist. In reality, great as was the moral energy of tliis period 
of Elsmere’s life, the dominant distinguishing note of it was 
not moral but intellectual. 

In matters of conduct he was but developing habits and ten¬ 
dencies already strongly present in him ; in matters of think¬ 
ing, with every month of this winter he was becoming con¬ 
scious of fresh forces, fresh hunger, fresh horizons. 

“ One half of your day he the hing of your worldf Mr. Grey 
had said to him : “ the other half he the slave of some thing 
which will take you out of your worlds into the^ general life, 
the life of thought, of man as a whole, of the universe.” 


304 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


The counsel, as we have seen, had struck root and flowered 
into action. So iriany men of Elsmere’s type give themselves 
up once and for all as they became mature to the life of doing 
nnd feeling, practically excluding tlie life of thought. It was 
lleniy Grey’s influence, in all probability, perliaps, too, the 
training of an earlier Langliam, that saved for Elsmere the life 
of tliouglit. 

The form taken by this training of his own mind he had been 
thus encouraged not to abandon was, as we know, the study 
of history. He had well mapped out before him that book on 
tlie origins of"Franee which lie had described to Langham. It 
Avas to take liini years, of course, and meanwhile, in his first 
enthusiasm, he avuxs like a child, reveling in the treasure of 
Avorkthat lay before him. And he liad told Langham, he had 
just got beloAV the surface of a great subject and Avas beginning 
to dig into the roots of it. Hitherto he had been under the 
guidance of men of his OAvn day, of the nineteenth century 
historian, Avho refashions the past on the lines of his own mind, 
Avho gives it rationality, coherence, and, as it Axere, modernness, 
so that the main impression he jiroduces on us, so long as AA^e 
look at that past through him only, is on the Avhole an impres¬ 
sion of continuity^ of resemblance. 

Whereas, on the contrary, the first impression left on a man 
by the attempt to plunge into the materials of history for him¬ 
self is almost ahvays an extraordinarily sharp impression of 
difference, or contrast. Ultimately, of course, he sees that 
these men and Avomen Avliose letters and biographies, AAdiOjSe 
creeds and general conceptions he is investigating, are in trutli 
his ancestors, bone of his bone, flesh of iiis flesli. But at first 
the student Avho goes back, say, in the history of Europe, be¬ 
hind the Renaissance or behind the Crusades into the actual 
deposits of the past, is often struck AAUth a kind of vertigo. Tlie 
men and AAmmen Avhom he has dragged forth into the light of 
his OAAm mind are to him like some strange puppet-shoAA'". Thev 
are called by names he knoAVS—kings, bisho|)s, judges, poets, 
ju’iests, men of letters—but AAdiat a gulf betAA'een liim and them! 
What motives, AAdiat beliefs, AAdiat embryonic processes of 
thought and morals, Avhat bizarre combinations of ignorance 
and knoAAdedge, of the highest sanctity AAdth the loAvest cred¬ 
ulity or falsehood ; Avliat extraordinary prepossessions, born 
Avith a man and tainting his AAdiole Avays of seeing and thinh- 
ing from childhood to the grave ! Amid all the intellectnrT 
dislocation of the spectacle, indeed, he perceiA-es certain Greeks 
Slid certain Latins Avho represent a forAAUird strain, \Adio belong 
as it seems to a Avorld of their OAvn, a world ahead of them* 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


305 


To them he stretclies out liis hand : “ You,’’'’ lie says to them, 
“thonij:!! 3'our priests spoke to you not of Clirist, but of Zeus 
and Artemis, you are really my kindred ! ” But intellectual!}^ 
they stand alone. Around them, after them, for long ages the 
world “ spake as a child, felt as a child, understood as a child.” 

Then he sees what it is makes the difference, digs the gulf. 
“ Science,’’'^ the mind cries, “ ordered knowledge.'’’’ And so for 
the first time the modern recognizes what the accumulations of 
Ids forefathers have done for him. lie takes the torch which 
man has been so long and patiently fashioning to his hand, and 
turns it on the past, and at eveiy step the sight grows stranger, 
and 3'et more moving,'more pathetic. The darkness into which 
he penetrates does but make him grasp his own guiding light 
the more close A. And j^et, bit by bit, it has been prepared 
for him by these groping, half-conscious generations, and the 
scrutin}" which began in repulsion and laughter ends in a mar¬ 
veling gratitude. 

But the repulsion and the laughter come first, and during 
this winter of work Elsmere felt them both veiy strongh^ 
He would sit in the morning buried among the records of de- 
caying Rome and emerging France, surrounded by Chronicles, 
by. Church Councils, by lives of the saints, ly primitive s^^s- 
tems of law, pushing his imaginative, impetuous way through 
them. Sometimes Catherine would be there, and he would 
pour out on her soihething of what was in his own mind. 

One da}^ he was deep in the life of a certain saint. The saint 
had been bishop of a diocese in Southern France. His biog¬ 
rapher was his successor in the see, a man of high political 
importance in the Burgundian state, renowned besides for 
sanctity and learning. Oid}'^ some twenty vicars separated the 
biography, at the latest, from the death of its subject. It con¬ 
tained some curious material for social history, and Robert was 
reading it with avidity. But it was, of course, a tissue of mar¬ 
vels. The jmung bishop had practiced eveiy virtue known to 
the time, and wrought eveiy conceivable miracle, and the 
miracles were better told than usual, with more ingenuit}", 
more imagination. Perhaps on that account the}" struck the 
reader’s sense more sharply. 

“ And the saint said to the sorcerers and to the practicers of 
unholy arts, that they should do those evil things no more, for 
lie had bound the spirits of whom they were wont to inquire, 
and they would get no further answers to their incantations, 
ddien those stilf-necked sons of the devil fell iqion the man of 
God, scourged him sore, and threatened him with death, if he 
would not instantly loose those spirits he had bound. And see- 


306 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


ing lie could prevail nothing, and being, moreover, admonished 
by God so to do, he permitted them work their own damna¬ 
tion. For he called for a parchment and wrote upon it: ‘ jUn- 
brose unto Satan — Enter! ’ ddien was the spell loosed, the 
spirits returned, the sorcerers inquired as they were accustomed, 
and received answers. But in a short space of time every one 
of them perished miserably and was delivered unto his natural 
lord Satanas, whereunto he belonged.” 

Robert made a hasty exclamation, and turned to Catherine, 
who was working beside him, read the passage to her, with a 
few words as to the book and its author. 

Catherine’s work dropped a moment on to her knee. 

“ What extraoi-dinary superstition ! ” she said, startled. “ A 
bishop, Robert, and an educated man ? ” 

Robert nodded. 

“ But it is the whole habit of mind,” he said half to himself, 
staring into the fire, “ that is so astounding. No one escapes 
it. The whole age really is non-sane.” 

“I suppose the devout Catholic would believe that ? ” 

“ I am not sure,” said Robert, dreamily, and remained sunk 
in thought for long after, while Catherine worked, and po.n- 
dered a Christmas entertainment for her girls. 

Perhaps it was his scientific work, fragmentary as it was, 
that Avas really quickening and sharpening these historical im¬ 
pressions of his. Evolution—once a mere germ in the mind— 
Avas beginning to press, to encroach, to .intermeddle with the 
mind’s,other furniture. 

And the comparative instinct—that tool par excellence, of 
modern science—Avas at last fully aAvake, was groAving fast, 
taking hold, noAV here, noAV there. 

“ It is tolerably clear to me,” he said to himself suddenly’- 
one Avinter afternoon, as he Avas trudging home alone from 
Mile End, “ that some day or other I must set to Avork to bring 
a little order into one’s notions of the Old Testament. At 
])resent they are just a chaos ! ” 

He Avalked on a Avhile, struggling Avith the rainstorm Avhich 
had overtaken him, till again the mind’s quick life took voice. 

“ But what matter ? God is the beginning—God in the 
prophets—in Israel’s best life—God is Christ! Hoav are any 
theories about the Pentateuch to touch that ? ” 

And into the clear eyes, the young face aglow Avith Avind 
and rain, there leaped a light, a softness indescribable. 

But the vivider and the keener greAv this neAV mental life of 
Elsmere’s, the most constant became his sense of soreness as to 
that foolish and motiveless quarrel which divided him from the 


HOBERT ELSMERE. 


307 


squire, N’aturally lie was forever being harassed and pulled up 
in his work by the mere loss of theMurewell library. To have 
such a collection so close, and to be cut otf fi-oni it, was a state 
of things no student could helj) feeling severely. But it was 
much more than that : it was the man he hankered after ; the 
man who was a master where he was a beginner ; tlie man who 
had given his life to learning, and was cariying all his vast 
accumulations somberly to the graves, unused, untransmitted. 

“He miglit have given me his knowledge,”thouglit Els- 
mere, sadly, “ and I—I—would have been a son to him. Why 
is life so perverse ? ” 

Meanwhile he was as much cut off from the great house and its 
master as though both had been surrounded by the thorn hedge 
of fairy tale. The Hall had its visitors during these winter 
months, but the Elsmeres saw nothing of tlieni, Robert 
gulped down a natural sigh when one Saturday evening, as he 
passed the Hall gates, he saw driving through them the chief 
of English science side by side with tlie most accomplished of 
English critics. 

“ ‘ There are good times in the world, and I ain’t in ’em ! ’ ” 
he said to himself, with a laugh and a shrug, as he turned up 
the lane to the rectory, and then, boy-like, was ashamed of 
himself, and greeted Catherine witli all the tenderer greeting. 

Only on two occasions during three months could he be sure 
of having seen the squire. Both were in tlie twilight, when, as 
the neighborhood declared, Mr. Wendover always walked, and 
both made a sharp impression bn the rector’s nerves. In the 
heart of one of the loneliest commons of the parish Robert, 
swinging along one November evening through the scattered 
furze-bushes, growing ghostly in the darkness, was suddenly 
conscious of a cloaked figure with slouching shoulders and head 
bent forward coming toward him. It passed without recogni¬ 
tion of any kind, and for an instant Robert caught the long, 
sharpened features and haughty eyes of the squire. 

At another time Robert Avas walking far from home, along 
a bit of level road. The pools in the ruts were just filmed Avith 
frost, and gleamed under the sunset; the Avinter dusk Avas clear 
and chill. A horseman turned into tlie road from the side lane. 
It Avas the squire again, alone. The sharp sound of the ap- 
ju'oaching hoofs stirred Robert’s pulse, and as they passed each 
other the rector raised his hat. He thought his greeting Avas 
acknowledged, but could not be quite sure. From the shelter 
of a group of trees he stood a moment and looked after the re¬ 
treating figure. It and the horse shoAved dark against a Avide 
sky barred by stormy reds and purples. The wind whistled 


308 


llOBiaiT ELSMFAiE. 


tliroagh tlie witliered oaks ; the long road with its lines of 
glimmering pools seemed to stretch endlessly into tlie sunset ; 
and with every minute the night strode on. Age and loneli¬ 
ness could have found no litter setting. A shiver ran through 
Elsmere as he stepped forward. 

Undoubtedly the quarrel, helped by his work, and the per¬ 
petual presence of that beautiful house commanding the whole 
country round it from the plateau above the river, kept Elsmere 
specially in mind of the squire. As before their hi-st meeting, 
and in spite of it, he became more and more imaginatively pre¬ 
occupied with him. One of the signs of it was a strong desire 
to read the squire’s two famous books : one, ‘‘ The Idols of the 
l\[arket-])lace,” an attack on English beliefs ; the other, “ Es¬ 
says on English Culture,” an attack on English ideals of edu¬ 
cation. He had never come across them as it happened, and 
])erhaps Xewcome’s denunciation had some effect in inducing 
him for a time to refrain from reading them. But in Decem¬ 
ber he ordered them and waited their coming with impatience. 
He said nothing of the order to Catherine ; somehow there 
were b}^ now two or three portions of his work, two or three 
branches of his thought, Avhich had fallen out of their common 
discussion. After all she was not literary, and with ail their 
oneness of soul there could not be an identity of interests or 
pursuits. 

The books arrived in the morning. (Oh, how dismally well, 
with what a tightening of the heart, did Robert always remem¬ 
ber that day in after-years !) He was much too busy to look 
at them, and went olT to a meeting. In the evening, coming 
home late from his night-school, he found Cathei-ine tired, sent 
her to bed, and went himself into his study to put together 
some notes for a cottage lecture he was to give the following 
day. The packet of books, unopened, lay on his writing-table. 
He took off the wrapper, and in his eager way fell to reading 
the first he touched. 

It was the first volume of “The Idols of the Market-])lace.” 

Ten or twelve years before, Mr. Wendover had launched 
this book into a startled and protesting England. It had been 
the fruit of his first renewal of contact with English life and 
English ideas after his return from Berlin. Fresh from the 
speculative ferment of Germany and the far profaner sceptic¬ 
ism of France, he had returned to a society where the first 
chapter of Genesis and the theory of verbal inspiration were 
still regarded as valid and important counters on the board of 
thought. The result had been this book. In it each strong- 
bold of English popular religion had been assailed in turn, at a 


ROBERT ELSMERE, 


309 


time when English orthodoxy was a far more formidable thing 
than it is now. 

The Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Gospels, St. Paul, Tradi¬ 
tion, the Fathers, Protestantism and Justification by Faith, 
the Eighteenth Century, the Broad Church Movement, Angli¬ 
can Tlieology—the squire had his say about them all. And 
while the coolness and frankness of the method sent a shock 
of indignation and horror tlirough the religious public, the 
subtle and caustic style, and the ej^igrams with which the 
book was strewn, forced both the religious and irreligious 
public to read, whether they would or no. A storm of con¬ 
troversy rose round the volumes, and some of the keenest ob¬ 
servers of English life had said at the time, and maintained 
since, that the publication of the book had made or marked an 
epoch. 

Robert had lighted on those pages in the Essay on the Gos¬ 
pels where the squire fell to analyzing the evidence for the 
Resurrection, following up his analysis by an attempt at re¬ 
constructing the conditions out of which the belief in “the 
legend ” arose. Robert began to read vaguely at first, then 
to hurry on through page after page, still standing, seized at 
once by the bizarre power of the style, the audacity and range 
of the treatment. 

Not a sound in the house. Outside, the tossing, moaning 
December night ; inside, the faintly cracking fire, the standing 
figure. Suddenly it was to Robert as though a cruel, torturing 
hand were laid upon his inmost being. His breath failed him ; 
the book slipped out of his grasp ; he sank down upon his 
chair, his head in his hands. Oh, what a desolate, intolerable 
moment ! Over the young idealist soul there swept a dry, 
destroying whirlwind of thought. Elements gathered froiii 
all sources—from his own historical work, from the -squire’s 
book, from the secret half-conscious recesses of the mind— 
entered into it, and as it passed it seemed to scorch the heart. 

He stayed bowed there a while, then he roused himself with 
a half-groan, and hastily extinguishing his lamp he groped his 
way upstairs to his wife’s room. Catherine lay asleep. The 
child, lost among its Avhite coverings, slept too ; there was a 
dim light over the bed, the books, the pictures. Beside his 
wife’s pillow was a table on which there lay open her little 
Testament and the “ Imitation ” her father had given her. 
Elsmere sank down beside her, appalled by the contrast be¬ 
tween this soft religious peace and that black agony of doul t 
which still overshadowed him. He knelt there, restraining his 
breath lest it should wake her, wrestling piteously with him- 


310 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 

self, crying for pardon, for faith, feeling himself utterly un¬ 
worthy to touch even the dear hand that lay so near him. 
But gradually the traditional forces of his life reasserted them¬ 
selves. The horror lifted. Prayer brought comfort and a 
passionate healing self-abasement. “ Master, forgive—defend~ 
purify,” cried the aching heart. There is non'e other that 
fighteth for us^ but only Thou, O God!’’"' 

He did not open the book again. Next morning he put it 
back into his shelves. If there were any Christian who could 
affront such an antagonist with a light heart, he felt with a 
shudder of memory it was not he. 

“ I have neither learning nor exj^erience enough—yet,” he 
said to himself slowly, as he moved awa}^, “ of course it can 
be met, but I must grow, must think—first.” 

And of that night’s wrestle he said not a word to any living 
soul. He did penance for it in the tenderest, most secret 
ways, but he shrank in misery from the thought of revealing 
it even to Catherine. 


CHAPTER XXL 

Meanwhile the poor poisoned folk at Mile End lived and 
apparently throve, in defiance of all the laws of the universe. 
Robert, as soon as he found that radical measures were for 
the time hopeless, had applied himself with redoubled energy 
to making the people use such palliatives as were within their 
reach, and had preached boiled water and the removal of filth 
till, as he declared to Catherine, his dreams were one long san¬ 
itary nightmare. But he was not confiding enough to believe 
that the people paid much heed, and he hoped more from a 
hard dry winter than from any exertion either of his or theirs. 

But alas ! with the end of November a season of furious 
rain set-in. 

Then Robert began to watch Mile End with anxiety, for so 
far every outbreak of illness there had followed upon unusual 
damp. But the rain passed, leaving behind them no worse 
i-esults than the usual Avinter crop of lung ailments and rheu¬ 
matism, and he breathed again. 

Christmas came and went, and with the end of December 
the wet Aveather returned. Day after day rolling masses of 
southwest cloud came up from the Atlantic and wrapped the 
whole country in rain, which reminded Catherine of her West¬ 
moreland rain more than any she had yet seen in the south. 
Robert accused her of liking it for that reason, but she shook 
her head Avith a sigh, declaring that it was “ nothing without 
the becks.” 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


311 


One afternoon she was shutting the door of the school 
behind her, and stepping out on the road skirting the green— 
the bedabbled wintry green—when she saw Robert emerging 
from the Mile End lane. She crossed over to liim, wondering 
as she neared him that he seemed to take no notice of her. 
He was striding along, his wide-awake over his eyes, and 
so absorbed that she had almost touched him before he 
saw her. 

“ Darling, is that you ? Don’t stop me, I am going to take 
the pony-carriage in for Meyrick. I have just come back 
from that accursed place ; three cases of diphtheria in one 
house,—Sharland’s wife and two others down with fever.” 

She made a horrified exclamation. 

“ It will spread,” he said, gloomily, “ I know it will. I 
never saw the children look such a ghastly crew before. Well, 
I must go for Meyrick and a nurse, and we must isolate and 
make a fight for it.” 

In a few days the diphtheria epidemic in the hamlet had 
reached terrible proportions. There had been one death, 
others were expected, and soon Robert in his brief hours at 
home could find no relief in anything, so heavy was tlie op¬ 
pression of the day’s memories. At first Catherine for the 
child’s sake kept away ; but the little Mary was weaned, had 
a good Scotch nurse, was in every way thriving, and after a 
day or two Catherine’s craving to help, to be with Robert in. 
his trouble, was too strong to be withstood. But she dared 
not go backward and forward between her baby and the diph¬ 
theritic cliildren. So she bethought herself of Mrs. Elsmere’s 
servant, old Martha, who was still inhabiting Mrs. Elsmere’s 
cottage till a tenant could be found for it, and doing good 
service meanwhile as an occasional parish nurse. 'J’he baby 
and its nurse Avent over to the cottage, Catherine carried the 
child there, Avrapped close in maternal arms, and leaving her 
on old Martha’s lap, went back to Robert. 

Then she and he devoted themselves to a hand-to-hand fight 
with the epidemic. At the climax of it there Avere about twen¬ 
ty children down with it in different stages, and seven cases of 
fever. They had two hospital nurses ; one of the better cot¬ 
tages, turned into a sanatorium, accommodated the Avorst cases 
under the nurses, and Robert and Catherine, directed by them 
and the doctors, took the responsibility of the rest, he helping 
to nurse the boys and she the girls. Of the fever cases Shar¬ 
land’s wife was the worst. A feeble creature at all times, it 
seemed almost impossible she could weather through. But day 
after day passed, and by dint of incessant nursing she still 


312 


IlOBEnT ELSMEliE. 


lived. A 3 ’oiitli of twenty, tiie main sn])port of amotlier and 
live or six ^^oungto- c-liildi'en, was also desperately ill. Robert 
hardly ever had him out of his thouglits, and the bo^^’s dog-like 
alfectioii for the rector, struggling with his deathly weakness, 
was like a perpetual exemplihcation of Ahriman and Oi-muzd— 
the power of life struggling with the power of death. 

It was a fierce light. Presently it seemed to the husband 
and wife as though the few dailv" hours spent at the rectory were 
mere halts between successive acts of battle with the plague- 
fiend—a more real and grim Grendel of the IVIarshes—for the 
lives of children. Catherine could always slec]) in these inter¬ 
vals, quietly and dreamlessl^' ; Robert very soon could only 
sleep b\^the help of some prescription of old JMeyi'iclCs. On all 
occasions of strain since his boyhood there had been signs in 
him of a certain lack of constitutional hai'dness which his 
mother knew very well, but which his wife was only just be¬ 
ginning to recognize. However, he laughed to scorn any at¬ 
tempt to restrain his constant goings and comings, or those 
hours of night-nursing, in which, as the hospital nurses Avere 
the first to admit, no one was so successful as the rector. And 
when he stood up on Sundays to preach in MiireAvell Church, 
the worn and spiritual look of the man, and the knowledge 
Avarm at each heart of those before him of hoAV the rector not 
only talked but lived, carried every Avord home. 

This strain upon all the moral and physical forces, hoAvever, 
strangely enough, came to Robert as a kind of relief. It broke 
through a tension of brain Avhich of late had become an oppres¬ 
sion. And for both him and Catherine these dark times had 
moments of intensest jojq points of Avhite light illuminating 
heaven and earth. There Avere cloudy nights—Avet, stornn^ 
Januaiy nights—Avhen sometimes it happened to them to come 
back both together from the hamlet, Robert carrying a lantern, 
Catherine clothed in Avater-proof from head to foot, Avalking be¬ 
side him, the rays flashing noAV on her face, noAv on the Avooded 
sides of the lane, Avhile the Avind howled through the dark Auanlt 
of branches overhead. And then, as they talked or Avere silent, 
suddenly a sense of the intense blessedness of this comradeship 
of theirs Avould rise like a flood in the man’s heart, and he Avould 
ding his free arm round her, forcing her to stand a moment in 
the January night and storm Avhilehe said to her Avords of ])as- 
sionate gratitude, of faith in an immortal union reaching be¬ 
yond change or death, lost in a kiss Avhich Avas a sacrament. 
Then there Avere the moments Avhen they saAV their child, held 
high in Martha’s arms at the AvindoAv, and leaping toAvard her 
mother, the moments Avhen one pallid, sickly being after an- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


313 


other was pronounced out of danger ; and by the help of them 
the weeks passed away. 

Nor were tliey left without help from outside. Lady Helen 
Varley no sooner heard the news than she hurried over. Rob¬ 
ert, on his way one morning from one cottage to another, saw 
her pony-carriage in the. lane. He hastened up to her before 
she could dismount. 

“ No, Lady Helen, you mustn’t come here,” he said to her 
peremptorily, as she held out her hand. 

“ Oh, iMr, Elsmere, let me. My boy is in town with his 
grandmother. Let me just go through at any rate, and see 
what I can send you.” 

Robert shook his head, smiling. A common friend of theirs 
and hers had once described this little lady to Elsmere by a 
French sentence which originally applied to the Huchesse de 
Choiseul. ^ “ Une charmante petite fee sortie cVun muf en- 
chante! ”—so it ran. Certainly, as Elsmere looked down u])on 
her now, fresh from those squalid, death-stricken hovels behind 
him, he was brought more abruptly than ever upon the con¬ 
trasts of life. Lady Helen wore a green velvet and fur mantle, 
in the production of which even AVorth had felt some pride; a 
little green velvet bonnet perched on her fair hair ; one tiny 
hand, ungloved, seemed ablaze with diamonds; there were opals 
and diamonds someAvhere at her throat, gleaming among her 
sables. But she wore her jewels as carelessly as she wore her 
high birth, her quaint, irregular prettiness, or the one or two 
brilliant gifts which made her sought after wherever she went. 
She loved her opals as she loved all bright things; if it pleased 
her to wear them in the morning, she wore them ; and in five 
minutes she was ca))able of making the sourest Puritan forget 
to frown on her and them. To Robert she always seemed the 
({uintessence of breeding, of aristocracy at their best. All her 
freaks, her sallies, her absurdities even, were graceful. At her 
freest and gayest there were things in her—restraints, reti¬ 
cences, perceptions—which implied behind her generations of 
rich, happy, im])ortant people, with ample leisure to cultivate 
all the more delicate niceties of social feeling and relation. 
Robert was often struck by the curious differences between her 
and Rose. Rose was far the handsomer ; she Avas at least as 
clever ; and she had a strong imperious will where Lady Helen 
had only impulses and sympathies and engouements. But Rose 
belonged to the class which struggles, where each individual 
depends upon hiinself and knows it. Lady Helen had never 
struggled for anything—all the best.things of the Avorld were 
liers so easily that she hardly gave them a thought; or rather, 


314 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


what she had gathered without paiu she held so lightly, she 
dispensed so lavishlj^, that men’s eyes followed he^r, fluttering 
through life, with much the same feeling as was struck from 
Clough’s radical hero by the peerless Lady Maria : 

“Live, be lovely, forget us, be beautiful, even to proudness, 

Even for tliei/poor sakes whose happiness is to beliold you ; 

Live, be uncaring, be joyous, be sumptuous ; only be lovely ! ” 

“Uncaring,” however, little Lady Helen never was. If she 
was a fairv, she was a fairy all heart, all frank, foolish smiles 
and tears. 

“No, Lady Helen—no,” Robert said again. “This is no 
place for you, and we are getting on capitally.” 

She pouted a little. 

“ I believe you and Mrs. Elsmere are just killing yourselves 
all in a corner, with no one to see,” she said indignantly. “ If 
you won’t let me see, I shall send Sir Harry. But who ”—and 
iier brown fawn’s eyes ran startled over the cottages before 
her—“ who, Mr. Elsmere, does this dreadful place belong to ? ” 

“ Mr. Wendover,” said Robert shortly. 

“Impossible ! ” she cried incredulously. “ Why, I wouldn’t 
rsk one of my dogs to sleep there,” and she pointed to the near¬ 
est hovel, whereof the walls were tottering outward, the thatch 
was falling to pieces, and the windows were mended with anj^- 
thing that came handy—rags, paper, or the crown of an old hat. 

“ No, you would be ill advised,” said Robert, looking with 
a bitter little smile at the sleek dachshund that sat blinking 
beside its mistress. 

“ But what is the agent about ? ” 

Then Robert told her the story, not mincing his words. Since 
the epidemic had begun, all that sense of imaginative attraction 
which had been reviving in him toward the squire had been 
simply blotted out by a fierce heat of indignation. When he 
thought of Mr. Wendover now, he thought of him as the man 
to whom in strict truth it was owing that helpless children 
died in choked torture. All that agony of Avrath and pity he 
had gone through in the last ten days sprung to his lips noAV 
as he talked to Lady Helen, and poured itself into his words. 

“ Old Meyrick and I have taken things into our own hands 
now,” he said at last, briefly. “We have already made two 
cottages fairly habitable. To-morroAv the inspector comes. 
I told the people yesterday I wouldn’t be bound by my promise 
a day longer. He must put the screw on Henslowe, and if 
Henslow dawdles, why we shall just drain and repair and sink 
for a well ourselves. I can find the money somehow. At pres¬ 
ent AV'e get all our water from one of the farms on the brow.’’ 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


315 


Money ! ” said Lady Helen impulsively, her looks warm 
with sympathy for the pale, harassed young rector. Sir 
Harry shall send you as much as you want. And anything 
else—blankets—coals ? ” 

Out came her note-book, and Robert was drawn into a list. 
Then, full of joyfulness.at being allowed to help, she gathered 
up her reins, she nodded her pretty little head at him, and 
w'as just starting off her ponies at full speed, equally eager 
“ to tell Harry ” and to ransack Churton for the stores required, 
when it occurred to her to pull up again. 

“ Oh, Mr. Elsmere, my aunt. Lady Charlotte, does nothing 
but talk about your sister-in-law. Why did you keep her all 
to yourself? Is it kind, is it neighborly, to have such a 
wonder to stay with you and let nobody share ? ” 

“ A wonder ? ” said Robert, amused. “ Rose plays the 
violin very well, but—” 

“ As if relations ever saw one in proper perspective ! ” ex¬ 
claimed Lady Helen. ‘‘ My aunt wants to be allowed to have 
her in town next season if you will all let her. I think she 
would find it fun. Aunt Charlotte knows all the world and 
his wife. And if I’m there, and Miss Leybui'n will let me 
make friends with her, why, you know I can just protect her 
a little from Aunt Charlotte ! ” 

The little, laughing face bent forward again; Robert smiling 
raised his hat, and the ponies whirled her oif. If anybody else, 
Elsmere would have thought all this effusion insincere or 
patronizing. But Lady Helen was the most spontaneous of 
mortals, and the only high-born woman he had ever met who 
was really, and not only apparently, free from the “ nonsense 
of rank.” Robert shrewdly suspected Lady Charlotte’s social 
tolerance to be a mere varnish. But this little person, and 
her favorite brother Hugh, to judge from the accounts of him, 
must always have found life too romantic, too wildly and de¬ 
lightfully interesting from top to bottom, to be measured by 
any but romantic standards. 

Kext day Sir Harry Varley, a great burly country squire, 
who adored his wife, kept the hounds, owned a model estate, 
and thanked God every morning that he was an Englishman, 
rode over to Mile End. Robert, who had just been round the 
place with the inspector and was dead tired, had only energy 
to show him a few of the worst enormities. Sir Harry, leaving 
a check behind him, rode off with a discharge of strong lan¬ 
guage, at which Robert, clergyman as he was, only grimly 
smiled. 

A few days later a\[r. Wendover’s crimes as a land-owner, his 


316 


ROBEUT ELSMERE. 


agent’s brutality, young Elsmere’s devotion, and the horrors 
of the Mile End outbreak, were in everybody’s rnoutlis. The 
county was roused. The Radical newspaper came out on the 
Saturday with a flaming article ; Robert, much to his annoy¬ 
ance, found himself tlie local hero ; and money began to come 
in to liim freely. 

On tlie Monday morning Henslowe appeared on the scene 
witli an army of workmen. A racy communication from the 
inspector had reached him two days before, so had a copy of 
the Cliurton Advertiser, He had spent Sunday in a drink¬ 
ing bout, turning over all possible plans of vengeance and 
evasion. Toward the evening, however, his wife, a gaunt, 
clever Scotch woman, who saw ruin before them, and had on 
occasion an even sharper tongue than her husband, managed to 
capture tlie supplies of brandy in the house and effectually 
conceal them. Then she waited for the moment of collapse 
which came on toward morning, and with her hands on her 
hips she poured at him a volley of home-truths which not even 
Sir Harry Varley could have bettered. Henslowe’s nerve gave 
way. He went out at daybreak, white and sullen, to look 
for workmen. 

Robert, standing on the step of a cottage, watched him give 
his orders, and took vigilant note of their substance. They 
embodied the inspector’s directions, and the rector was satis¬ 
fied. Henslowe was obliged to pass him on his way to another 
group of houses. At first he affected not to see the rector, 
then suddenly Elsmere was conscious that the man’s bloodshot 
eyes wyre on him. Such a look ! If hate could have killed, 
Elsmere would have fallen where he stood. Yet the man’s 
hand mechanically moved to his hat, as though the spell of his 
wife’s harangue were still potent over his shaking muscles. 

Robert took no notice whatever of the salutation. He stood 
calmly watching till Henslowe disap})eared into the last house. 
Then he called one of the agent’s train, heard what was to be 
done, gave a sharp nod of assent, and turned on his heel. So 
far so good ; the servant had been made to feel, but he wished 
it had been the master. Oh, those three little emaciated creat¬ 
ures whose e^^es he had closed, whose clammy hands he had 
held to the last !—what reckoning should be asked for their 
undeserved torments when the Great Account came to be 
made up. 

Meanwhile not a sound api)arently of all this reached the 
squire in the sublime solitude of Miirewell. A fortnight had 
passed. Henslowe had been conquered, the county had rushed 
to Elsmerc’s help, and neither he nor Mrs. Darcy had made a 


noBEnr elsmeiw. 


01 *• 

o 1 / 

sign. Their life was so abnormal that it was perfectly pos¬ 
sible they had heard nothing. Elsmere wondered when they 
icould hear. 

The rector’s chief help and support all through had been old 
Meyrick. The parish doctor had been in bed with rheuma¬ 
tism when the epidemic broke out, and Robert, feeling it a 
comfort to be rid of him, had thrown the whole business into 
the hands of Me3U'ick'and his son. This son was nominally 
his.father’s junior partner, but as he was, besides, a young and 
brilliant M.I). fi-esh from a great hospital, and his father was 
just a poor old general practitioner, with the barest qualifica¬ 
tion, and only forty years’ experience to recommend him, it 
will easily be imagined that the subordination was purely nom¬ 
inal. Indeed young Meyreck was fast ousting his father in 
all direction, and the neighborhood, which had so far found 
itself unable either to enter or to quit this mortal scene without 
old Meyrick’s assistance, was beginning to send notes to the 
house in Churton High Street, whereon the superscription 
“Dr. Edicard was underlined with ungi-ateful em¬ 

phasis. The father took his deposition very quietly. Only 
on Murewell Hall would he allow no trespassing, and so long 
as his son left him undisturbed there, he took his effacement 
in other quarters with perfect meekness. 

Young Elsmere’s behavior to him, however, at a time when 
all the rest of the Churton world was beginning to hold him 
cheap and let him see it, had touched the old man’s heart, and 
lie was the rector’s slave in this Mile End business, Edward 
Meyrick would come whirling in and out of the hamlet once a 
day. Robert was seldom soriy to see the back of him. His 
attainments, of course, Avere useful, but his cock-sureness was 
irritating, and his manner to his father abominable. The 
father, on the other hand, came over in the shabby ])ony-cart 
he had driven for the last forty years, and having himself no 
press of business, would spend hours with the rector over the 
cases, giving them an infinity of patient watching, and amusing 
Robert by the cautious hostility he Avould allow himself every 
now and then toward his son’s neAv-fangled devices. 

At first jVIeyrick shoAved himself fidgety as to the squire. 
Had he been seen, been heard from ? He received Robert’s 
sharp iiegatiA^es Avith long sighs, but Robert clearly saAv that, 
like the rest of the world, he Avas too much afraid of ]Mi-. Wen- 
dover to go and beard him. Some months before, as it hap¬ 
pened, Elsmere had t^ild him the story of his encounter Avith 
the squire, and liad been a good deal moved and surprised by 
the old man’s concern. 


318 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


One day, about three weeks from the beginning of the out¬ 
break, when the state of things in the hamlet was beginning 
decidedly to mend, Meyrick arrived for his morning round, 
much preoccu})ied. He hurried his work a little, and after it 
was done asked Robert to walk up the road with him. 

“I have seen the squire, sir,” he said, turning on his com¬ 
panion, with a certain excitement. 

Robert flushed. 

“ Have you ? ” he replied, with his hands behind him and a 
world of expression in his sarcastic voice. 

“Youmisjudge him ! You misjudge him, Mr. Elsmere ! ” 
the old man said, tremulously. “I told you he could know 
nothing of this business—and he didn’t ! He has been in town 
part of the time, and down here—how is he to know an3’'thing ? 
He sees nobody. That man Henslowe, sir, must be areal bad 
fellow.” 

“ Don’t abuse the man,” said Robert, looking up. “ It’s not 
worth while, when you can say jmur mind of the master.” 

Old Meyrick sighed. 

“Well,” said Robert after a moment, his lip drawn and 
quivering, “ You told him the story, I suppose ? Seven deaths, 
is it, by now ? Well, what sort of impression did these unfor¬ 
tunate accidents,”—and he smiled—“ produce ? ” 

“ He talked of sending money,” said Me3’'rick doubtfull3" ; 
“ he said he would have Henslowe up and inquire. He seemed 
put about and annoyed. Oh, Mr. Elsmere, 3^11 think too hardly 
of the squire, that 3-011 do ! ” 

The3^ strolled on together in silence. Robert was not in¬ 
clined to discuss the matter. But old Meyrick seemed to be 
laboring under some suppressed emotion, and presently he be¬ 
gan upon his own experience as a doctor of the Wendover fam¬ 
ily. He had already broached the subject more or less vaguel3^ 
with Robert. Now, however, he threw his medical reserve, 
generally his strongest characteristic, to the Avinds. He insisted 
on telling his companion, w-ho listened reluctantly, the whole 
miserable and ghastly story of the old squire’s suicide. He 
described the heir’s summons, his arrival just in time for the 
last scene with all its horrors, and that mysterious condition 
of the squire for some months afterward, when no one, not 
even Mrs. Darcy, had been admitted to the Hall, and old Mey¬ 
rick, directed at intervals b3^ a great London doctor, had been 
the only spectator of Roger Wendover’s physical and mental 
breakdown, the only witness of that dai^k consciousness of in¬ 
herited fatalit3^ which at that period of his life not even the 
squire’s iron will had been able wholl3^ to conceal. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


319 


Robert, whose attention was inevitably roused after a while, 
found himself with some curiosity realizing the squire from 
another man’s totally ditferent point of view. Evidently Mey- 
i-ick had seen him at such moments as wring from the harshest 
nature whatever grains of tenderness, of pity, or of natural 
luiman weakness may be in it. And it was clear, too, that the 
squire, conscious perhaps of a shared secret, and feeling a cer¬ 
tain soothing influence in the naivete and simplicity of the old 
man’s sympathy, had allowed himself at times, in the years 
succeeding that illness of his, an amount of unbending in Mey- 
rick’s presence, such as probably no other mortal had ever 
witnessed in him since his earliest youth. 

And yet how childish the old man’s whole mental image of 
the squire was after all. What small accout it made of the 
subtleties, the gnarled intricacies, and contradictions of such a 
character. Robert did not know very much of the squire, 
but he knew enough to feel sure that this confiding, indulgent 
theory of Meyrick’s was ludicrously far from the mark as an 
adequate explanation of Mr. Wendover’s later life. 

l^resently Meyrick became aware of the sort of tacit resist¬ 
ance which liis comp.anion’s mind was opposing to his own. He 
dropped tlie wandering narrative he was busy upon with a sigh. 

“ Ah, well, I dare say, it’s hard, it’s hard,” he said with 
patient acquiescence in his voice, “ to believe a man can’t help 
liirnself. I dare say we doctors get to muddle up right and 
wrong. But if ever there was a man sick in mind—for all 
his book-learning they talk about—and sick in soul, that man 
is the squire.” 

Robert looked at him with a softer expression. There was 
a new dignity about the simple old man. The old-fashioned 
deference, which had never let him forget in speaking to 
Robert that he was speaking to a man of family, and which 
showed itself in all sorts of antiquated locutions which were 
a torment to his son, had given way to something still more 
deeply ingrained. His gaunt figure, with the stoop, and the 
spectacles, and the long, straight hair—like the figure of a 
superannuated school-master—assumed, as he turned again to 
his younger companion, something of authority, something 
almost of stateliness. 

“Ah, Mr. Elsrnere,” he said, laying his shrunk hand on the 
younger man’s sleeve and speaking with emotion, “ you’re 
very good to the poor. We’re all proud of you—you and 
your good lady. But when you were coming, and I heard 
tell all about you, I thought of my poor squire, and T said to 
myself, ‘ That young man’ll be good to him. The squire will 


320 


nOBERT ELSMERE. 


make friends with him, and Mr. Elsmere will have a good 
wife—and there’ll be children born to him—and the squire 
will take an interest—and—and—may be—’ ” 

The old man paused. Robert grasped his hand silently. 

‘‘ And there was something in the wa^^ between you,” the 
speaker went on, sighing. “I dare say you were quite riglit— 
quite right. I can’t judge. Only there are ways of doing a 
thing. And it was a last chance ; and now it’s missed—it’s 
missed. Ah ! it’s no good talking ; he has a heart—he has ! 
Many’s the kind thing he’s done in old daySfor me and mine— 
I’ll never forget them ! But all these last few years—oh, I 
know, I know. You can’t go and shut your heart up, and fly 
in the face of all the duties the Lord laid on 3^011, without 
losing yourself and setting the Lord against you. But it is 
pitiful, Mr. Elsmere, it’s pitiful ! ” 

It seemed to Robert suddenl}^ as though there was a Divine 
breath passing thi’ough the wintry lane and through the shak¬ 
ing voice of the old man. Beside the spirit looking out of tliose 
wrinkled eyes, his own hot youth, its justest resentments, its 
most righteous angers, seemed crude, harsh, inexcusable. 

“ Thank you, Meyrick, thank you, and God bless 3^011 ! 
Don’t imagine I will forget a word you have said to me.” 

The rector shook the hand he held warmly twice over, a 
gentle smile passed over Meyrick’s aging face, and tliey parted. 

That night it fell to Robert to sit up after midnight with 
John All wood, the youth of twenty whose case had been a 
severer tax on the powers of the little nursing staff than per¬ 
haps an3"’ other. Mother and neiglibors were worn out, and it 
was difticult to spare a hospital nurse for long togerher from 
tlie diphtheria cases. Robert, therefore, had insisted during 
the preceding week on taking alternate nights with one of the 
nurses. During the first hours before midnight he slept 
soundly on a bed made up in the ground-floor room of the 
little sanatorium. Tlien at twelve the nurse called him, and 
he went out, his e3^es still heavy with sleep, into a still, frosty 
winter’s night. After so much rain, so much restlessness of 
wind and cloud, the silence and the starry calm of it were 
infinitely welcome. The sharp, cold air cleared his brain and 
braced his nerves, and by the time he reached the cottage 
whether he was bound, he was broad awake. He opened the 
door softl3q passed through the lower room, crowded with 
sleeping children, climbed the narrow stairs as noiselessly as 
possible, and found himself in a garret, faintly lighted, a bed 
in one corner and a woman sitting beside it. Tlie woman 
glided aAva3q the rector looked carefull3^ at the table of in- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


321 


structions hanging over the bed, assured himself tliat wine 
and milk and beef essence and medicines were ready to his 
hand, put out his watch on the wooden table near the bed, 
and sat him down to his task. The boy was sleeping the sleep 
of weakness. Food was to be given every half-hour, and in 
this perpetual impulse to the system lay his only chance. 

The rector had his Greek Testament with him, and could 
just read it by the help of the dim light. But after a while, as 
the still hours passed on, it dro})ped on to his "knee, and he sat 
thinking—endlessly thinking. The young laborer lay motion¬ 
less beside him, the lines of the long emaciated frame showing 
through the bed-clothes. The night-light flickered on the 
broken, discolored ceiling; every now and then a mouse 
scratched in the plaster ; the mother’s heavy breathing came 
from the next room ; sometimes a dog barked or an owl cried 
outside. Otherwise deep silence, such silence as drives the 
soul back upon itself. 

Elsmere w’as conscious of a strange sense of moral expan¬ 
sion. The stern judgments, the passionate condemnations 
which his nature housed so painfully seemed lifted from it. 
Ths soul breathed an ‘‘ampler sether, a diviner air.” Oh! 
the mysteries of life and character, the subtle, inexhaustible 
physical environment; the relations of mind to bod}", of 
man’s poor will to this tangled, tyrannous life—it was along 
these old, old lines his thoughts went painfully groping ; and 
always at intervals it came back to the squire, pondering, 
seeking to understand, a new" soberness, a new humility and 
patience entering in. 

And yet it was not Meyrick’s facts exactly that had brought 
this about. Robert thought them imperfect, only half true. 
Rather was it the spirit of love, of inflnite forbearance in 
which the simpler, duller nature had declared itself that had 
appealed to him, nay, reproached him. 

Then these thoughts led him on further and further from 
man to God, from human defect to the Eternal Perfectness. 
Never once during those hours did Elsmere’s hand fail to per¬ 
form its needed service to the faint sleeper beside him, and 
yet that night was one long dream and strangeness to him, 
nothing real anywhere but consciousness, and God its source ; 
the soul attacked every now and then by phantom stabs of 
doubt, of bitter, brief misgivings, as the barriers of sense be¬ 
tween it and the eternal enigma grew more and more trans})ar- 
ent, wrestling awhile, and then prevailing. And each golden 
moment of certainty, of conquering faith, seemed to Robert 
in some sort a gift from Catherine’s hand. It was she who 


322 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


led him through the shades ; it was her voice murmuring in 
his ear. 

When the first gray dawn began to creep in slowly percepti¬ 
ble waves into the room, Elsmere felt as though not liours but 
years of experience lay between him and tlie beginnings of his 
watch. 

‘‘It is by these moments we should date our lives,” he mur¬ 
mured to himself as he rose ; “ they are the only real land¬ 
marks.” 

It was eight o’clock, and the nurse who was to relieve him 
had come. The results of the night for his charge were good ; 
the strength had been maintained, the pulse was firmer, the 
temperature lower. The boy, throwing ofi: his drowsiness, 
lay watching the rector’s face as he talked in an undertone to 
the nurse, his haggard eyes full of a dumb, friendly wistfulness. 
When Robert bent over him to say good-by, this expression 
brightened into something more positive, and Robert left him, 
feeling at last that there was a promise of life in his look and 
touch. 

In another moment he had stei^ped out into the January 
morning. It was clear and still as the night had been. In the 
east there was a pale promise of sun ; the reddish-brown 
trunks of the fir woods had just caught it, and rose faintly 
glowing in endless vistas and colonnades one behind the 
other. The flooded river itself rushed through the bridge as 
full and turbid as before, but all the other water surfaces had 
gleaming films of ice. The whole ruinous place had a clean, 
almost a,festal air under the touch of the frost, while on the 
side of the hill leading to Murewell tree rose above tree, the 
delicate network of their wintry twigs and branches set 
against stretches of frost-whitened grass, till finally they 
climbed into the pale, all-completing blue. In a copse close at 
hand there were wood-cutters at work, and piles of gleaming 
laths shining through the underwood. Robins hopped along 
the frosty road, and as he walked on through the houses to¬ 
ward the bridge, Robert’s quick ear distinguished that most 
wintry of all sounds—the cry of a flock of fieldfares passing 
overhead. 

As he neared the bridge he suddenly caught sight of a figure 
upon it, the figure of a man wrapped in a large Inverness cloak, 
leaning against tlie stone parapet. With a start he recognized 
the squire. 

He went up to him without an instant’s slackening of his 
stead}^ step. The squire heard the sound of some one coming, 
turned, and saw the rector. 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


323 


l am glad to see you here, Mr. Weiidover,” said Robert, 
stopping and holding out his hand. “ I meant to have come 
to talk to you about this place this morning. I ought to have 
come before. 

lie spoke gently, and quite simply, almost as if they had 
parted the day before The squire touched his hand for an in¬ 
stant. “ You may not, perhaps, be aware, Mr. Elsmere,” he 
said, endeavoring to speak with all his old hauteur, while his 
heavy lips twitched nervously, ‘‘ that for one reason and an¬ 
other, I knew nothing of the epidemic here till yesterday, 
when Meyrick told me.” 

“ I heard from Mi-. Meyrick that it was so. As you are here 
now, Mr.AYendover, and 1 am in no great hurry to get home, 
may 1 take 3"OU through and show you the people ? ” 

The squire at last looked at him straight—at the face worn 
and pale, yet still so extraordinarily youthful, in which some¬ 
thing of the solemnity and high emotion of the night seemed 
to be still lingering. 

“Are you just come? ” he said abruptly, “ or are you going 
back?” 


“I have been here through the night, sitting up with one of 
the fever cases. It’s hard Avork for the nurses, and the rela¬ 
tions sometimes, Avithout help.” 

The squire mov'ed on mechanically toward the village, and 
Robert moved beside him. 

“ And Mrs. Elsmere ? ” 

“ Mrs. Elsmere was here most of yesterday. She used to 
stay the night when the diphtheria Avas at its worst; but there 
are only four anxious cases left—the rest all convalescent.” 

The squire said no more, and they turned into the lane, 
Avhere the ice lay thick in the dee}) ruts, and on either hand 
curls of smoke rose into the clear, cold sky. The squire looked 
about him Avith eyes which no detail escaped.- Robert, with¬ 
out a Avord of comment, pointed out this feature and that, 
showed Avhere Ilenslowe had begun repairs, where the new Avell 
was to be, Avhat the water supply had been till now, drew the 
squire’s attention to the roofs, the pig-sties, the drainage or 
rather complete absense of drainage, and all in the dry voice of 
some one going through a catalogue. Word had already fled 
like Avildfire through the hamlet that the squire Avas there. 
Children and adults, a })ale emaciated crew, })oured out into 
the wintry air to look. The squire knit his brows Avith an¬ 
noyance as the little crowd in the lane grew. Robert took no 
notice. 

Presently he pushed upon the door of the house Avhcre he 


324 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


had spent the night. In the kitchen a girl of sixteen was 
clearing away the various nondescript heaps on which the 
family liad slept, and was preparing breakfast, The squire 
looked at the floor. 

“I thought I understood from Henslowe,” he muttered, as 
though to himself, “ that there were no mud floors left on the 
estate—” 

‘‘ There are only three houses in Mile End without them,” 
said Robert, catching what he said. 

They went upstairs, and the mother stood open-eyed while 
the squire’s restless look gathered in the details of the room, 
the youth’s face, as he lay back on his pillow, whiter than 
they, exhausted and yet refreshed by the sponging with vinegar 
and water which the mother had just been administering to 
him ; the bed, the gaps in the worm-eaten boards, the spots in 
the roof where the plaster bulged inward, as though a shake 
would bring it down ; the coarse china shepherdesses on the 
mantel-shelf, and the flowers which Catherine had put there 
the day before. He asked a few questions, said an abrupt 
word or two to the mother, and they tramped downstairs 
again and into the street. Then Robert took him across lo 
the little improvised hospital, saying to him on the threshold, 
with a moment’s hesitation : 

‘‘ As you know, for adults there is not much risk, but there 
is always some risk—” 

A peremptory movement of the squire’s hand stopped him, 
and they went in. In the downstairs room were half a dozen 
convalescents, pale, shadowy creatures, four of them under 
ten, sitting up in their little cots, each of them with a red 
flannel jacket drawn from Lady Helen’s stores, and enjoying 
the breakfast which a nurse in white cap and apron had just 
brought them. Upstairs, in a room f]*om which ix lath-and- 
plaster partition had been removed, and which had been adapt¬ 
ed, warmed and ventilated by various contrivances to whicli 
Robert and Meyrick had devoted their practical minds, wei’e 
the “ four anxious cases.” One of them, a little creature of 
six, one of Sharland’s black-eyed children, was sitting up, sup¬ 
ported by the nurse, and coughing its little life away. As soon 
as he saw it Robert’s step quickened. He forgot the squire 
altogether. He came and stood by the bedside, rigidly still, 
for he could do nothing, but his whole soul absorbed in that 
horrible struggle for air. How often he had seen it now, and 
never without the same wild sense of revolt and protest ! At 
last the hideous membrane was loosened, the child got relief, and 
lay back white and corpse-like, but with a pitiful momentary 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


825 


relaxation of the drawn lines on its little brow. Robert stooped 
and kissed the damp tiny hand. The child’s eyes remained 
shut, but the fingers made a feeble effort to close on his. 

“Mr. Elsmere,” said the nurse, a motherly body, looking at 
him with friendly admonition, “if you don’t go home and rest 
you’ll be ill, too, and I’d like to know who’ll be the better for 
that?” 

“ How many deaths ? ” asked the squire abruptly, touch¬ 
ing Elsmere’s arm, and so reminding Robert of his existence. 

“ Meyrick spoke of deaths.” 

He stood near the door, but his eyes were fixed on the little * 
bed, on the half-swooning child. 

“ Seven,” said Robert, turning upon him. “Five of diphthe¬ 
ria, two of fever. The little one will go, too.” 

“ Horrible ! ” said the squire, under his breath, and then 
moved to the door. 

The two men went downstairs in perfect silence. Below, 
in the convalescent room, the children were capable of smiles, 
and of quick, coquettish beckonings to the rector to come and 
make game with them as usual. But he could only kiss his 
hand to tliein and escape, for there was more to do. 

He took the squire through all the remaining fever cases and 
into some of the worst cottages—Milsom’s among them—and 
when it was all over they emerged into the lane again, near the 
bridge. There was still a crowd of children and women hanging 
about, watching eagerl^^ for the squire, whom many of them had 
never seen at all all, and about whom various myths had gradu¬ 
ally formed themselves in the country side. Tlie squire walked 
away from them liurriedly, followed by Robert, and again they 
halted on the center of the bridge. A liorse led by a groom was 
being walked up and down on a flat piece of road just beyond. 

It was an awkward moment. Robert never forgot the thrill 
of it, or the association of wintry sunshine streaming down 
upon a sparkling world of ice and delicate woodland and 
foam-flecked river. 

The squire turned toward him irresolutely ; his sharpl}^ cut, 
wrinkled lips opening and closing again. Then he held out 
his hand : “Mr. Elsmere, I did you a wrong—I did this place 
and this people a wrong. In my view, regret for the past is 
useless. Much of what has occurred here is plainly irreparable ; 

I will think what can be done for the future. As for my rela¬ 
tion to you, it rests with you to say whether it can be amended. 

I recognize that you have just cause of complaint.” 

Wliat invincible pride there was in the man’s very surrender ! 
But Elsmere was not repelled by it. He knew that in tlieir 


326 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


hour together the squire had/ 6 ^^. His soul had lost its bitter¬ 
ness. The dead and their wrong were with God. 

He took the squire’s outstretched hand, grasping it cordially, 
a pure, unwoi’ldly dignity in his whole look and bearing. 

“Let us be friends, Mr. Wendover. It will be a great com¬ 
fort to us—my wife and me. Will you remember us both 
very kindly to Mr. Darcy? ” 

Commonplace words, but words that made an epoch in the 
life of both. In another minute the squire, on horseback, was 
trotting along the side road leading to the Hall, and Robert 
was speeding home to Catherine as fast as his long legs could 
carry him. 

She was waiting for him on the steps, shading her ej'es 
against the unwonted sun. He kissed her with the spirits of a 
boy and told her all his news. 

Catherine listened bewildered, not knowing what to say or 
how all at once to forgive, to join Robert in forgetting. But 
that strange spiritual glow about him was not to be withstood. 
She threw her arms about him at last with half a sob : 

“ Oh, Robert—yes ! Dear Robert—thank God ! ” 

“Never think anymore,” he said at last, leading her in from 
the little hall, “ of what has been, only of what shall be ! Oh, 
Catherine, give me some tea ; and never did I see anything 
so tempting as that arm-chair.” 

He sank down into it, and when she put his breakfast beside 
him she saw with a start that he was fast asleep. The wife 
stood and Avatched him, the signs of ’fatigue round eyes and 
mouth, the placid expression, and her face was soft Avith ten¬ 
derness and joy. “ Of course—of course, even that hard man 
must love him. Who could help it ? My Robert ! ” 

And so noAV in this disguise, noAV in that, the supreme hour 
of Catherine’s life stole on and on toAvard her. 

CHAPTER XXH. 

As may be imagined, the Churton Advertiser did not find 
its way to MureAvell. It AA^as certainly no pressure of social 
disapproval that made the squire go down to Mile End in that 
Avinter’s dawn. The county might talk or the local press might 
harangue till doomsday, and Mr. Wendover Avould either 
known nothing or care less. 

Still his interview with Meyrick in the park after his return 
from a week in tOAvn, whither he had gone to see some old Ber¬ 
lin friends, had been a shock to him. A man may play the 
" intelligent recluse, may refuse to fit his life to his neighbors’ 
notions as much as he please, and still find death, especially 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


827 


death for which he has some responsibility, as disturbing a 
fact as the rest of us. 

He went home in much irritable discomfort. It seemed to 
him probably that fortune need not have been so eager to put 
him in the wrong. To relieve his mind he sent for HensloAve, 
and in an interview, the memory of which sent a shiver through 
the agent to the end of his days, he let it be seen that though 
it did not for the moment suit him to dismiss the man who had 
brought this upon him, that man’s reign in any true sense was 
over. 

But afterward the squire was still restless. What was astir 
in him was not so much pity or remorse as certain instincts of 
race which still survived under the strange superstructure of 
manners he had built upon them. It may"be the part of a gen¬ 
tleman and a scholar to let the agent whom you have inter¬ 
posed between yourself and a boorish peasantiy have a free 
hand ; but, after all, the estate is yours, and to expose the rec¬ 
tor of the parish to all sorts of avoidable risks in the pursuit 
of his official duty by reason of the gratuitous filth of 3^111- 
property, is an act of doubtful breeding. The squire in his 
most rough-and-tumble da3"S at Berlin had always felt him¬ 
self the grandee as well as the student. He abhorred sen¬ 
timentalism, but neither did he choose to cut an unseemly 
figure in his own e3^es. 

After a night, therefore, less tranquil or less meditative than 
usual, he rose earl3^ and sallied forth at one of those unusual 
hours he generally chose for walking. The thing must be put 
right somehow, and at once, with as little waste of time and 
energy as possible, and Henslowe had shown himself not to be 
trusted ; so telling a servant to follow him, the squire had 
made his way with difficulty to a place he had not seen for 
3^ears. 

Then had followed the unexpected and unwelcome apparition 
of the rector. The squire did not want to be impressed b}^ the 
young man, did not want to make friends with him. No doubt 
his devotion had served his own purposss. Still Mr. Wendover 
was one of the subtlest living judges of character when he 
pleased, and his enforced progress through these hovels with 
Elsmere had not exactly softened him, but had filled him with 
a curious contempt for his own hastiness of judgment. 

‘‘ History would be inexplicable, after all, without the honest 
fanatic,” he said to himself on the way home. “ I suppose I 
had forgotten it. There is nothing like a dread of being bored 
for blunting 3''our ps3mhological instinct.” 

In the course of the day he sent olf a letter to the rector, in- 


328 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


timating in tlie very briefest, dryest way that tlie cottages 
should be rebuilt on a different site as soon as possible, and in¬ 
closing a liberal contribution toward the expenses incurred in 
fighting the epidemic. When the letter was gone he drew his 
books toward him with a sound which was partly disgust, 
partly relief. This annoying business had wretchedly inter¬ 
rupted him, and his concessions left him mainly conscious of a 
strong nervous distaste for the idea of any fresh interview with 
young Elsmere. He had got his money and his apology ; let 
him be content. 

However, next morning after breakfast Mr. Wendover once 
more saw his study door open to admit the tall figure of the 
rector. The note and check had reached Robert late the night 
before, and, true to his new-born determination to make the 
best of the squire, he had caught up his wide-awake at the first 
opportunity and walked off to the Hall to acknowledge the gift 
in person. The interview opened as awkwardly as it was pos¬ 
sible, and with their former conversation on the same spot 
fresh in their minds, both men spent a sufficiently difficult ten 
minutes. The squire was asking himself indeed, impatiently, 
all the time, whether he could possibly be forced in the future to 
put up with such an experience again, and Robert found his 
host, if less sarcastic than before, certainly as impenetrable as 
ever. 

At last, however, the Mile End matter was exhausted, and 
then Robert, as good luck would have it, turned his longing 
eyes on the squire’s books, especially on the latest volumes of 
a magnificent German “ Weltgeschichte ” lying near his elbow, 
Avhich he had coveted for months without being able to 
conquer his conscience sufficiently to become the possessor 
of it. 

He took it up with an exclamation of delight,and a quiet criti¬ 
cal remark that exactly hit the value and scope of the book. 
The squire’s eyebrows went up, and the corners of his moutii 
slackened visibly. Half an hour later the two men, to tlie 
amazement of Mrs. Darcy, who was watching them from the 
drawing-room window, walked back to the park gates together, 
and what Robert’s nobility and beauty of character would never 
have won him, though he had worn himself to death in the 
service of the poor and tormented under the squire’s eyes, a 
chance coincidence of intellectual interest had won him almost 
in a moment. 

The squire walked back to the house under a threatening 
sky, his mackintosh cloak wrapped about him, his arms folded, 
his mind full of an unwonted excitement. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


329 


The sentiment of long-past days—da5’'s in Berlin, in Paris, 
where conversations such as that lie had just passed through 
were the daily relief and reward of labor—was stirring in him. 
Occasionally he had endeavored to import the materials for 
them from the Continent, from London. But as a matter of 
fact it was years since he had had any such talk as tliis with an 
Englislmian on English ground, and he suddenly realized that 
he had been unwholesomely solitary, and that for the scholar 
there is no nerve stimulus like that of an occasional interchange 
of ideas with some one acquainted with his Fach. 

“ Who would ever have thought of discovering instincts and 
aptitudes of such a kind in this long-legged optimist?” The 
squire shrugged his shoulders as he thought of the attempt in¬ 
volved in such a personality to combine both worlds, the world 
of action and the world of thought. Absurd ! Of course, ulti¬ 
mately one or other must go to the wall. 

Meanwhile, what ludicrous Avaste of time and opportunity 
that he and this man should have been at cross-purposes like 
this. “ Why the deuce couldn’t he have given some rational 
account of himself to begin with ! ” thought the squire irrita¬ 
bly, forgetting, of course, who it Avas that had AAdiolly denied 
him the opportunity. “And then the sending back of those 
books ; AAdiat a piece of idiocy ! ” 

Granted an historical taste in this young parson, it Avas a 
curious chance, Mr. Wendover reflected, that in his choice of 
a subject he should just have fallen on the period of the later 
empire—of the passage from the old Avorld to the neAV, where 
the squire Avas a master. The squire fell to thinking of the 
kind of knowledge implied in his remarks, of the stage he 
seemed to have reached, and then to cogitating as to the books 
he must be now in want of. He Avent back to his library, ran 
over the shelves, picking out volumes here and there with an 
unAvonted gloAV and interest all the while. He sent for a case, 
and made a youth who sometimes acted as his secretary pack 
them. And still as he went back to his own Avork ncAV names 
Avould occur to him, and full of the scholar’s avaricious sense 
of the shortness of time, he Avould shake his head and froAvn 
OA^'er the three months AAdiich young Elsmere had already passed, 
grappling with problems like Teutonic Arianism, the spread of 
JMonasticism in Gaul, and Heaven knows what besides, half a 
mile from the man and library Avhich could haA^e supplied 
him with the best help to be got in England, unbenelited by 
either ! Mile End was obliterated, and the annoyance of the 
morning forgotten. 

The next day was Sunday, a wet January Sunday, raw and 


330 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


sleety, the frost breaking up on all sides and flooding the roads 
Avith mire. 

Robert, rising in his place to begin morning service, and 
Avondering to see the congregation so good on such a day, Avas 
suddenly startled, as his eye traveled mechanically over to the 
Hall pcAV, usually tenanted by Mrs. Darcy in solitary state, to 
see the characteristic flgure of tlie squire. His amazement Avas 
so great that he almost stumbled in the exhortation, and liis 
feeling Avas evidently shared by the congregation, Avhich 
throughout the service showed a restlessness, an excited ten¬ 
dency to peer round corners and pillars, that Avas not favorable 
to devotion. 

“ Has he come to spy out the land? ” the rector thought to 
himself, and could not help a momentary tremor at the idea of 
preaching before so formidable an auditor. Then he pulled 
himself together by a great effort, and fixing his eyes on a 
shock-headed urchin half-Avay doAvn the church, read the ser¬ 
vice to him. Catherine, meaiiAvliile, in her seat on the northern 
side of the nave, her soul lulled in Sunday peace, kneAV noth¬ 
ing of Mr. Wendover’s appearance. 

Robert preached on the first sermon of Jesus, on the first 
appearance of the young Master in the synagogue at Nazareth : 
“ This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears ! ” 

The sermon dwelt on the Messianic aspect of Christ’s mission, 
oiytlie mystery and poetry of that long national expectation, on 
the pathos of JeAvish disillusion, on the sureness and beauty of 
Christian insight as faith gradually transferred trait after trait 
of the Messiah of prophecy to the Christ of Nazareth. At 
first there was a certain amount of hesitation, a slight Avavering 
hither and thither—a difficult choice of AA^ords—and then the 
soul freed itself from man, and the preacher forgot all but his 
Master and His people. 

At the door as he came out stood Mr. Wendover, and Cath¬ 
erine, slightly flushed and much puzzled for conversation, be¬ 
side him. The Hall carriage AA^as draAvn close up to tlie door, 
and ]\Irs. Darcy, evidently much excited., had her small head 
out of the AvindoAAq and Avas shoAvering a number of flighty 
inquiries and suggestions on her brother, to which he paid no 
more heed than to the patter of the rain. 

When Robert appeared the squire addressed him ceremoni¬ 
ously : 

“ With your leave, Mr. Elsmere, I will Avalk with you to 
the rectory.” Then, in another voice “ Go home, Letitia, 
and don’t send anything or anybody.” 

He made a signal to the coachman, nnd the carriage started, 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


331 


Mrs. Darcy’s protesting head remaining out of the window, as 
long as anything could be seen of the group at the church 
door. The odd little creature had paid one or two hurried and 
recent visits to Catherine during the quarrel, visits so filled, 
however, with vague railing against her brother and by a queer, 
incoherent melancholv, that Catherine felt them extremely 
uncomfortable, and took care not to invite them. Clearlj'- she 
was raortall}^ afraid of “ Roger,” and yet ashamed of being 
afraid. Catherine could see that all the poor thing’s foolish 
whims and affectations were trampled on ; that she suffered, 
rebelled, found herself no more able to affect Mr. AVendover 
than if she had been a fly buzzing round him, and became all 
the more foolish and whimsical in consequence. 

The squire and the Elsmeres crossed the common to the rec¬ 
tory, followed at a discreet interval by groups of villagers cur¬ 
ious to get a look at the squire. Robert was conscious of a 
good deal of embarrassment, but did his best to hide it. Cath¬ 
erine felt all thi'ough as if the skies had fallen. The squire 
alone was at his ease, or as much at his ease as he ever was. 
He commented on the congregation, even condescended to say 
something of the singing, and passed over the staring of the 
choristers with a magnanimity of silence which did him credit. 

They reached the rectoiy door, and it was evidently the 
squire’s purpose to come in, so Robert invited him in. Cath¬ 
erine threw open her little drawing-room door, and then was 
seized with shyness as the squire passed in, and she saw over 
his shoulder her baby, lying kicking and crowing bn the 
hearth-rug, in anticipation of her arrival, the nurse watching 
it. The squire in his great cloak stopped, and looked down 
at the baby as if it had been some curious kind of reptile. 
The nurse blushed, curtsied, and caught up the gurgling crea¬ 
ture in a twinkling. 

Robert made a laughing remark on the tyranny and ubiquity 
of babies. The squire smiled grimly. He supposed it was 
necessary that the human race should be carried on. Cather¬ 
ine meanwhile slipped out and ordered another place to be laid 
at the dinner-table, devoutly hoping that it might not be used. 

It was used. The squire stayed till it was necessary to invite 
him, then accepted the invitation, and Catherine found herself 
dispensing boiled mutton to him, while Robert supplied him 
with some very modest claret, the sort of wine which a man 
who drinks none thinks it necessary to have in the house, and 
watched the nervousness of their little parlor-maid with a fel¬ 
low-feeling which made it difficult for him during the early 
part of the meal to keep a perfectly straight countenance. 


332 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


After a while, however, both he and Catherine were ready to 
admit that the squire was making himself agreeable. He 
talked of Paris, of a conversation he had had with M. Renan, 
whose name luckily was quite unknown to Catherine, as to the 
state of things in the French Chamber. 

“ A set of chemists and quill-drivers,” he said contemptu¬ 
ously ; but as Renan remarked to me, there is one thing to 
be said for a government of that sort: ‘ Ils ne font pas la 
guerre? And so long as they don’t run France into adventures, 
and a man can keep a roof over his head and a sou in his 
pocket, the men of letters at any rate can rub along. The 
really interesting thing in France just now is not French 
politics—Heaven save the mark !—but French scholarship. 
There never was so little original genius going in Paris, and 
there never was so much g'ood work being gone.” 

Robert thought the point of view eminently characteristic. 

“ Catholicism, I suppose,” he said, as a force to be reck¬ 
oned with, is dwindling more and more ? ” 

“ Absolutely dead,” said the squire emphatically, ‘‘ as an 
intellectual force. They haven’t got a writer, scarcely a 
preacher. Not one decent book has been produced on that 
side for years.” 

“ And the Protestants, too,” said Robert, ‘‘ have lost all 
their best men of late,” and he mentioned one or two well- 
known French Protestant names. 

“ Oh, as to French Protestantism”—and the squire’s shrug 
was superb—“ Teutonic Protestantism is in the order of 
things, so to speak, but Latin Protestantism ! There is no 
more sterile hybrid in the world ! ” 

Then, becoming suddenly aware that he might have said 
something inconsistent with his company, the squire stopped 
abruptly. Robert, catching Catherine’s quick compression of 
the lips, was grateful to him, and the conversation moved on 
in another direction. 

Yes, certainly, all things considered, Mr. Wendover made 
himself agreeable. He ate his boiled mutton and drank his 
ordinaire like a man, and when the meal was over, and he and 
Robert had withdrawn into the study, he gave an emphatic 
word of praise to the coffee which Catherine’s housewifely care 
sent after them, and accepting a cigar, he sank into the arm¬ 
chair b}" the fire and spread a bony hand to the blaze, as if he 
had been at home in that particular corner for months. Rob¬ 
ert, sitting opposite to him, and watching his guest’s eyes 
travel round the room, with its medicine shelves, its rods and 
nets, and preparations of uncanin^ beasts, its parish litter, and 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


333 


its teeming book-cases, felt tliat the Mile End matter was 
turning out oddly indeed. 

“ I have packed you a case of books, Mr. Elsmere,” said the 
squire, after a puff or two at his cigar. “ How have you got 
on without that collection of Councils ? ” 

He smiled a little awkwardly. It was one of the books Rob¬ 
ert had sent back. Robert flushed. lie did not want the 
squire to regard him as wholly dependent on Mure well. 

“ I bought it,” he said, rather shortly. “ I have ruined my¬ 
self in books lately, and the London Library supjflies me really 
Avonderfully well.” 

‘‘ Are these your books ? ” The squire got up to look at 
them. “ Hum, not at all bad for a beginning. I have sent 
you so and so,” and he named one or two costly folios that 
Robert had long pined for in vain. 

The rector’s eyes glistened. 

“ That was very good of you,” he said simply. “ They will 
be most welcome.” 

“ And now, how much said the other, settling him¬ 

self again to liis cigar, his thin legs crossed over each other, 
and l>is great head sunk into his shoulders, “ how much time 
do you give to this w^ork ? ” 

“ Generally the mornings—not always. A man with twelve 
hundred souls to look after, you know, Mr. Wendover,” said 
Elsmere, Avith a bright, half-defiant accent, “ can’t make 
grubbing among the Franks his main business.” 

The squire said nothing, and smoked on. Robert gathered 
that his companion thought his chances of doing anything 
Avorth mentioning very small. 

“ Oh, no,” he said, folloAving out his OAvn thought A\dth a 
shake of his curly hair ; “ of course I shall never do very 
much. But if I don’t it Avon’t be for Avant of knowing Avhat 
the scholar’s ideal is.” And he lifted his hand Avith a smile 
toward the squire’s book on “ English Culture,” which stood 
in the book-case just above him. The squire, following the 
gesture, smiled too. It Avas a faint, slight illumining, but it 
changed the face agreeabl3^ 

Robert began to ask questions about the book, about the 
pictures contained in it of foreign life and foreign universities. 
The squire consented to be draA\m out, and presently was talk¬ 
ing at his A^ery best. 

Racy stories of Mommsen or Van Ranke were followed hj a 
description of an CA^ening of mad carouse with Heine—a talk 
at Nohant Avith George Sand—scenes in the Duchesse de Brog¬ 
lie’s salon—a contemptuous sketch of Guizot—a caustic sketch 


334 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


of Renan. Robert presently even laid aside his pipe, and 
stood in his favorite attitude, lounging against the mantel¬ 
piece, looking down, absorbed, on his visitor. All that intel¬ 
lectual passion which his struggle at Mile End had for a mo¬ 
ment checked in him revived. Nay, after his weeks of exclu¬ 
sive contact with the most hideous forms of bodily ill, this in¬ 
terruption, these great names, this talk of great movements 
and great causes, had a special savor and relish. All the hori¬ 
zons of the mind expanded, the currents of the blood ran 
quicker. 

Suddenly, however, he sprang up. 

“ I beg your pardon, Mr. Wendovei’, it is too bad to inter¬ 
rupt you—I have enjoyed it immensely—but the fact is, I have 
only two minutes to get to Sunday-school in ! ” 

Mr. Wendover rose also, and resumed his ordinaiy manner. 

“ It is I who should apologize,” he said with stiff politeness, 
“ for having encroached in this way on your busy day, Mr. 
Elsmere.” 

Robert helped him on with his coat, and then suddenly the 
squire turned to him. 

You were preaching this morning on one of the Jsaiah 
quotations in St. Matthew. It would interest you, I imagine, 
to see a recent Jewish book on the subject of the prophecies 
quoted in the Gospels which reached me yesterday. Thei-e 
is nothing particularly new in it, but it looked to me well 
done.” 

“ Thank you,” said Robert, not, however, with any great 
heartiness, and the squire moved away. They parted at the 
gate, Robert running down the hill to the village as fast as his 
long legs could carry him. 

Sunday-school—pshaw ! ” cried the squire, as he tramped 
homeward in the opposite direction. 

Next morning a huge packing-case arrived from the Hall, 
and Robert could not forbear a little gloating over the treas¬ 
ures in it before he tore himself away to pay his morning visit 
to Mile End. There everything was improving ; the poor 
Sharland child indeed had slipped away on the night after the 
squire’s visit, but the otlier bad cases in the diphtheria ward 
were mending fast. John Allwood was gaining strength daily, 
and poor Mary Sharland was feebly struggling back to a life 
which seemed hardly worth so much effort to keep. Robert 
felt, with a welcome sense of slackening strain, that the daily 
and houi-ly superintendence which he and Catherine had been 
giving to the place might lawfully be relaxed, that the nurses 
on the spot were now more than equal to their task, and after 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


335 


having made his round he raced home again in order to secure 
an hour with his books before luncheon. 

Tlie following day a note arrived, while they were at lunch¬ 
eon, in the squire’s angular, precise handwriting. It contained 
a request that, unless otherwise engaged, the rector would 
walk with Mr. Wendover that afternoon. 

Robert flung it across to Catherine. 

“ Let me see,” he said, deliberating, “ have I any engage¬ 
ment I must keep ? ” 

There was a sort of jealousy for his work within him con¬ 
tending with this new fascination of the squire’s company. 
But, honestly, there was nothing in the way, and he went. 

That walk was the first of many. The squire had no sooner 
convinced himself that young Elsmere’s society did in reality 
provide him with a stimulus and recreation he had been too 
long without, than in his imperious, willful way he began to 
possess himself of it as much as possible. He never alluded to 
the trivial matters which had first separated and then united 
them. He worked the better, he thought the more clearly, for 
these talks and walks with Elsmere, and therefore these talks 
and walks became an object with him. They supplied a long- 
stifled want, the scholar’s want of disciples, of some form of 
investment for all that heaped-up capital of thought he had 
been accumulating during a life-time. 

As for Robert, he soon felt himself so much under the spell 
of the squire’s strange and powerful personality that he was 
forced to make a fight for it, lest this new claim should en¬ 
croach upon the old ones. He would walk when the squire 
liked, but three times out of four these walks must be parish 
rounds, interrupted by descents into cottages and chats in 
farm-house parlors. The squire submitted, ddie neighborhood 
began to wonder over the strange spectacle of Mr. Wendover 
waiting grimly in the winter dusk outside one of his own farm- 
honses while Elsmere was insicV, or patroling a bit of lane till 
Elsmere should have inquired after an invalid or beaten up a 
recruit for his confirmation class, dogged the while by stealthy 
children, with fingers in their mouths, who ran away in terror 
directly he turned. 

Rumors of this new friendship spread. One day, on the bit 
of road between the Hall and the rectory. Lady Helen behind 
her ponies whirled past the two men, and her arch look at Els¬ 
mere said, as plain as words : “ Oh, you young wonder ! what 
hook has served you with this leviathan ? ” 

On another occasion, close to Churton, a man in a cassock 
and cloak came toward them. The squire put up his eyeglass. 


386 


nOBERT ELSMERE. 


“ llumpli ! ” he remarked ; “ do you know this merry-Aii- 
drew, Elsmere ? ” 

It was Newcome. As they passed, Robert, with slightly 
heightened color, gave him an affectionate nod and smile. 
Newcome’s quick eye ran over the companions, he responded 
stiffl}^ and his step grew more rapid. A week or two later 
Robert noticed a little prick of remorse that he had seen noth¬ 
ing of Newcome for an age. If Newcome would not come to 
him, he must go to IVIottringham. He planned an expedition, 
but something haj^pened to prevent it. 

And Catherine ? Naturally this new and most unexpected re¬ 
lation of Robert’s to the man who had begun by insulting him 
was of considerable importance to the wife. In the first place 
it broke up to some extent the exquisite tete-d-tete of their 
home life ; it encroached often upon time that had always been 
hers ; it filled Robert’s mind more and more with matters in 
which she had no concern. All these things many wives might 
have resented. Catherine Elsmere resented none of them. It 
is probable, of course, that she had her natural moments of re¬ 
gret and comparison, when love said to itself a little sorely and 
hungrily: “ It is hard to be even a fraction less to him than I 
once was ! ” But if so, these moments never betrayed them¬ 
selves in word or act. Her tender common sense, her sweet 
humility, made her recognize at once Robert’s need of intel¬ 
lectual comradeship, isolated as he was in this remote rural 
district. She knew perfectly that a clergyman’s life of per¬ 
petual giving forth becomes morbid and unhealthy if there is 
not some corresponding taking in. 

If only it had not been Mr. Wendover ! She marveled over 
the fascination Robert found in his dry, cynical talk. She won¬ 
dered that a Christian pastor could ever forget Mr. Wendo- 
ver’s antecedents ; that the man who had nursed those sick 
children could forgive Mile End. All in all as they were to 
each other, she felt for the first time that she often understood 
her husband imperfectly. His mobility, his eagerness, were 
sometimes now a perplexity, even a pain to her. 

It must not be imagined, however, that Robert let himself 
drift into this intellectual intimacy with one of the most dis¬ 
tinguished of anti-Christian thinkers without reflecting on its 
possible consequences. The memory of that night of misery 
which “ The Idols of the Market-place ” had inflicted on him 
was enough. He was no match in controversy for Mr. Wend¬ 
over, and he did not mean to attempt it. 

One morning the squire unexpectedly plunged into an ac¬ 
count of a German monograph he had just received on the sub- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


337 


ject of the Johaiinine authorship of the Fourth Gospel. It 
was almost the tirst occasion on which he had touched what 
may strictly be called the materiel of orthodoxy in their dis¬ 
cussions—at any rate directly. But the book was a striking 
one, and in the interest of it he had clearly forgotten his ground 
a little. Suddenly the man who was walking beside him 
interrupted him. 

“ I think we ought.to understand one another perhaps, Mr. 
Weudover,” Robert said, speaking under a quick sense of op¬ 
pression, but with his usual dignity and bright courtes}^ “ I 
know your opinions, of course, from your books; you know 
what mine, as an honest man, must be, from the position I 
hold. My conscience does not forbid me to discuss anything, 
only—I am no match for you on points of scholarship, and I 
should just like to say once for all, that to me, whatever else 
is true, the religion of Christ is true. I am a Christian and a 
Christian minister. Therefore, whenever we come to discuss 
what may be called Christian evidence, I do it with reserves, 
which you would not have. I believe in an Incarnation, a 
Resurrection, a Revelation. If there are literary difficulties, I 
must want to smooth them aAvay—you maj’’ want to make 
much of them. We come to the matter from different points 
of view. You will not quarrel with me for wanting to make 
it clear. It isn’t as if we differed slightly. We differ funda¬ 
mentally—is it not so ? ” 

The squire was walking beside him with bent shoulders, the 
lower lip pushed forward, as was usual with him when Im was 
considering a matter with close attention but did not mean to 
communicate his thoughts. 

After a^iause he said, with a faint, inscrutable smile: 

“ Your reminder is perfectly just. Naturally we all have our 
reserves. Neither of us can be expected to stultify his own.” 

And the talk went forward again, Robert joining in more 
buoyantly than ever, perhaps because he had achieved a neces¬ 
sary but disagreeable thing and got done with it. 

In reality he had but been doing as the child does when it 
sets up its sand-barrier against the tide. 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

It was the beginning of April. The gorse was fast extending 
its golden empire over the commons. On the sumi}^ slopes of 
the copses primroses were breaking through the hazel roots 
and beginning to gleam along the edges of the river. On the 
grass commons between Murewell and Mile End the birches 


338 


ROBmT ELSMERE. 


rose like green clouds against the browns and purples of the 
still leafless oaks and beeches. The birds were twittering and 
building. Every day Robert was on the lookout for the swal¬ 
lows, or listening for the flrst notes of the nightingale amid the 
bare spring coverts. 

But the spring was less perfectly delightful to him than it 
might have been, for Catherine was awaj''. Mrs. Leybiirii, who 
was to have come south to them in Februaiy, was attacked by 
bronchitis instead at Burwood and forbidden to move, even to 
a warmer climate. In Marcli Catherine, feeling restless and 
anxious about her mother, and thinking it hard that Agnes 
should have all the nursing and responsibility, tore herself 
from her man and her baby, and went north to Whindale for 
a fortnight, leaving Robert forlorn. 

Now, however, she was in London, whither she had gone for 
a few days on her way home, to meet Rose and to shop. 
Robert’s opinion was that all women, even St. Elizabeths, have 
somewhere rooted in them an inordinate partiality for shop¬ 
ping : otherwise why should that operation take four or flve 
mortal days ? Surely with a little energy, one might buy up 
the whole of London in twelve hours ! Ilowever, Catherine 
lingered, and as her purchases were made, Robert crossly sup- 
])osed it must be all Rose’s fault. lie believed that Rose sj^ent 
a great deal too much on dress. 

Catherine’s letters, of course, were full of her sister. Rose, 
she said, had come back from Berlin handsomer than ever, 
and playing, she supposed, magnificently. At any rate the let¬ 
ters whicli followed her in shoals from Berlin flattered her to 
the skies, and during the three months preceding her return 
Joachim himself had taken her as a pupil and given her 
unusual attention. 

“And now, of course,” wrote Catherine, “she is desperately 
disappointed that mamma and Agnes can not join lier in town, 
as she had hoped. She does her best, I know, poor child, to 
conceal it and to feel as she ought about mamma, but I can see 
that the idea of an indefinite time at Burwood is intolerable 
to her. As to Berlin, I think she has enjoj^ed it, but she talks 
very scornfully of German Schiodrmerei and German women, 
and she tells the oddest stories of her professors. With one 
or two of them she seems to have been in a state of war from 
the beginning ; but some of them, my dear Robert, I am per¬ 
suaded were just simply in love with her ! I don’t—no, I 
never shall believe, that independent, exciting student’s life is 
good for a girl. But I never say so to Rose! When she for¬ 
gets to be irritable and to feel that the world is going against 


ROBERT ELISMERE. 


339 


lier, she is often very sweet to me, and I can’t bear there 
should be any conflict.” 

His next day’s lettei- contained the following : 

“ Are you properly amused, sir, at your wife’s performances 
in town ? Our three concerts you have heard all about. I still 
can’t get over them. I go about haunted by the seriousiiess, 
the life-and-deatli interest people throw into music. It is as¬ 
tonishing ! And outside, as we got'into our hansom, such 
sights and sounds !—such starved, fierce-looking men, such 
ghastly women ! 

“ But since then Rose has been taking me into society. Yes¬ 
terday afternoon, after I wrote to you, Ave Avent to see Rose’s 
artistic friends—the lAarsons—Avith Avhom she Avas staying 
last summer, and to-day Ave have even called on Lady Char¬ 
lotte Wynnsta}^ 

“As to Mrs. Pierson, I never saAV such an odd bundle of 
ribbons and rags and queer embroideries as she looked Avlien 
Ave called. IIoAvever, Rose says that, for an ‘ an aesthete ’—she 
despises them noAV lierself—Mrs. Pierson has Avonderful taste, 
and that her Avall-pajjers and her goAvns, if I only understood 
them, are not the least like those of other aesthetic persons, 
but very recherche —which may be. She talked to Rose of 
nothing but acting, especially of Mine. Desforets. No one, 
according to lier, has anything to do Avitli an actress’s private 
life, or ought to take it into account. But, Robert, dear—an 
actress is a Avoman, and lias a soul! 

“ Then Lady Charlotte—you would have laughed at our 
entree. 

“ We found she Avas in toAvn, and went on her ‘day,’ as she 
lias asked Rose to do. The room was rather dark—none of 
these London rooms seem to me to have any light and air in 
them. The butler got our names Avrong, and I marched in 
first, more shy than I ever have been before in my life. Lady 
Charlotte had tAvo gentlemen with her. She evidently did not 
knoAV me in the least: she stood staring at me AA'ith her eyeglass 
on, and her cap so crooked I could think of nothing but a wish 
to put it straight. Then Rose followed, and in a feAV minutes 
it seemed to me as though it were Rose who were hostess, talk¬ 
ing to the tAvo gentlemen and being kind to Lady Charlotte. 
I am sure everybody in tlie room Avas amused by her self- 
possession, Lady Charlotte included. The gentlemen stared at 
her a great deal, and Lady Charlotte })aid her one or tAvo com¬ 
pliments on her looks, Avhich I though she Avould not have 
ventured to pay to any one in her own circle. 

We stayed about half an liour. One of tlie gentlemen Avas, 


340 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


I believe, a member of the government, an under-secretary fof 
something, but he and Rose and Lady Charlotte talked again 
of nothing but musicians and actors. It is strange tliat poli¬ 
ticians sliould liave time to know so much of these things. The 
other gentleman reminded me of Hotspur’s popinjay. I think 
now I made out that lie wrote for the newsjiapers, but at the 
moment I sliould have felt it insulting to accuse him of any 
thing so humdrum as an occupation in life. He discovered 
somehow that I had an interest in the Church, and he asked 
me, leaning back in his chair and lisping, whether I really 
thought ‘ the Church could still totter on a while in the rural 
dithtricts.’ He was informed her condition was so ‘ vewy 
dethperate.’ 

“ Then I laughed outright, and found my tongue. Perhaps 
his next article on the Church will have a few facts in it. I 
did m}^ best to put some into him. Rose at last looked round 
at me, astonished. But he did not dislike me, I think. I was 
not impertinent to him, husband mine. If I might have de¬ 
scribed just ooie of your days to his high-and-mightiness ! 
There is no need to tell you, I think, whether I did or not. 

‘‘ Then when we got up to go. Lady Charlotte asked Rose to 
stay with her. Rose explained why she couldn’t and Lady 
Charlotte pitied her dreadfully for having a family, and the un- 
der-secretaiy said that it was one’s first duty in life to trample 
on one’s relations, and that he hoped nothing would prevent 
his hearing her play some time later in the year. Rose said 
very decidedly she should be in town for the winter. Lady 
Charlotte said she would have an evening specially for her, 
and as I said nothing, Ave got away at last.” 

The letter of the following day recorded a little adventure : 

“ I was much startled this morning. I had got Rose to come 
with me to the National Gallery on our Avay to her dressmaker. 
We Avere standing before Raphael’s ‘Vigil of the Knight,’ 
when suddenly I saAV Rose, Avho Avas looking away toAvard the 
door into the long gallery, turn perfectly Avhite. I followed 
her ej^es, and there, in the ’door-Avay, disappearing—I am al¬ 
most certain—was Mr. Langham ! One can not mistake his 
walk or his profile. Before I could say a Avord Rose had 
Avalked away to another Avail of pictures, and Avhen Ave joined 
again Ave did not speak of it. Did he see us, I wonder, and 
purposely avoid us ? Something made me think so. 

“ Oh, I Avish I could believe she had forgotten him ! I am 
certain she Avould laugh me to angry scorn if I mentioned him; 
but there she sits by the fire noAv, while I am writing, quite 
drooping and pale, because she thinks I am not noticing. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


341 


If she did but love me a little more ! It must be my fault, I 
know. 

“ Yes, as you say. Bur wood may as well be shut up or let. 
]\Iy dear, dear father ! ” 

Robert could image the sigh with which Catherine had laid 
down her pen. Dear tender soul, with all its old-world fidel¬ 
ities and pietie’s pure and unimpaired ! He raised the signa¬ 
ture to his lips. 

Next day Catherine came back to him. Robert had no words 
too opprobrious for the widowed condition from which her re¬ 
turn liad rescued him. It seemed to Catherine, however, that 
life had been very full and keen with him since her departure ! 
He lingered with her after supper, vowing that his club boys 
might make what hay in the study they pleased ; he was going 
to tell her the news, whatever happened. 

“ I told you of my two dinners at the Hall ? The first was 
just tete-d-tete with the squire—oh, and Mrs. Darcy, of course. 
I am always forgetting her, poor little thing, which is most un¬ 
grateful of me. A pathetic life that, Catherine. She seems to 
me, in her odd way, perpetually hungering for affection, for 
praise. No doubt, if she got them, she wouldn’t know what 
to do with them. She would just touch and leave them as she 
does everything. Her talk and she are both as light and wan¬ 
dering as thistle-down. But still, meanwhile, she hungers, and 
is never satisfied. There seems to be something peculiarly an¬ 
tipathetic in her to the squire. I can’t make it out. He is 
sometimes quite brutal to her when she is more inconsequent 
than usual. I often wonder she goes on living with him.” 

Catherine made some indignant comment. 

“ Yes,” said Robert, musing. “ Yes, it is bad.” 

But Catherine thought his tone might have been more un¬ 
qualified, and marveled again at the curious lenity of judg¬ 
ment he had always shown of late toward Mr. Wendover. 
And all his judgments of himself and others were generally 
so quick, so uncompromising ! 

“ On the second occasion we had Freake and Dashwood,” 
naming two well-known English antiquarians. “ Very learned, 
very jealous, and very snuffy ; altogether ‘ too genuine,’ as 
pooV mother used to say of those old chairs we got for the 
dining-room. But afterward, when we were all smoking in 
the library, the squire came out of his shell and talked. I 
never heard him more brilliant ! ” 

He paused a moment, his bright eyes looking far away from 
her, as though fixed on the scene he was describing. 

“ Such a mind ! ” he said at last, with a long breath, ‘‘ such a 


342 


liOBERT ELSMERE. 


memory ! Oatlieriiie, my book lias been making great strides 
since you left. With Mr. Wendover to go to, all the problems 
are simplified. One is saved all false starts, all beating about 
the bush. What a piece of luck it was that put one down 
beside Such a guide, such a living storehouse of knowledge ! ” 

He spoke in a glow of energy and enthusiasm. Catherine 
sat looking at him wistfidl}^, her gray eyes crossed by many 
varying shades of memory and feeling. 

At last his look met hers, and the animation of it softened 
at once, grew gentle. 

“ Do you think I am making knowledge too much of a god 
just now. Madonna mine ? ” he said, throwing himself down 
beside her. “ I have been full of qualms myself. The squire 
excites one so, makes one feel as though intellect—accumula¬ 
tion—were the whole of life. But I struggle against it—I 
do. I go on, for instance, trying to make the squire do his 
social duties—behave like ‘ a human.’ ” 

Catherine could not help smiling at his tone. 

“ Well ?” she inquired. 

He shook his head ruefully. 

“ The squire is a tough customer—most men of sixty-seven 
with strong wills are, I suppose. At any rate, he is like one 
of the Thurston trout—sees through all my maneuvei s. But 
one piece of news will astonish you, Catherine ! ” And he 
sprang up to deliver it with elfect. “ Ilenslowe is dismissed.” 

“ Henslowe dismissed ! ” Catherine sat properly amazed 
while Robert told the story. 

The dismissal of Henslowe indeed represented the price 
which Mr. Wendover had been so far willing to pa}" for Els- 
mere’s society. Some quid pro quo there must be—that he 
was prepared to admit—considering their relative positions as 
squire and parson. But, as Robert shrewdly suspected, not 
one of his wiles so far had imposed on the master of jMurewell. 
He had his own sarcastic smiles over them, and over Elsmere’s 
pastoral naivete in general. The evidences of the young rec¬ 
tor’s power and popularity were, however, on the whole pleas¬ 
ant to Mr. Wendover. If Elsmere liad his will with all the 
rest of the world, Mr. Wendover knew perfectly well who it 
was that at the present moment had his will with Elsmere. 
He had found a great piquancy in this shaping of a mind more 
intellectually eager and pliant than any he had yet come across 
among younger men ; perpetual food, too, for his sense of 
irony, in the intellectual contradictions wherein Elsmere’s 
developing ideas and information were now, according to the 
squire, involving him at every turn. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


343 


“ Ilis religious foundations are gone already, if he did but 
know it,” Mr. Wendover grimly remarked to himself one day 
about this time, “ but he will take so long finding it out that 
the results are not worth speculating on.” 

Cynically assured, therefore, at bottom of his own power 
with this ebullient nature, the squire was quite prepared to 
make external concessions, or, as we have said, to pay his 
price. It annoyed him that when Elsmere would press for 
allotment land, or a hew institute, or a better supply of water 
for the village, it was not open to him merely to give carte 
blanche, and refer his petitioner to Ilenslowe. Robert’s 
opinion of Ilenslowe, and Ilenslowe’s now more cautious but 
still incessant hostility to the rector, were patent at last even 
to the squire. The situation was worrying and wasted time. 
It must be changed. 

So one morning he met Elsmere with a bundle of letters in 
his hand, calmly informed him that Ilenslowe had been sent 
about his business, and that it would be a kindness if Mr. 
Elsmere would do him the favor of looking through some 
ap])lications for the vacant post just received. 

Elsmere, much taken by surprise, felt at first as it was natu¬ 
ral for an over-sensitive, over-scrupulous man to feel. Ilis 
enemy had been given into his hand, and instead of victory he 
could only realize that he Iiad brought a man to ruin. 

“ He has a wife and children,” he said quickly, looking at 
the squire. 

“Of course I have pensioned him,” replied the squire im- 
patientl}'" ; “ otherwise I imagine he would be hanging round 
our necks to the end of the chapter.” 

There was something in the careless indifference of the tone 
wdiich sent a shiver through Elsmere. After all, this man 
had served the squire for fifteen years, and it was not Mr. 
Wendover who had much to complain of. 

No one with a conscience could have held out a finger to 
keep Ilenslowe to his post. But though Elsmere took the let¬ 
ters and promised to give them his best attention, as soon as 
he got home he made himself irrationally miserable over the 
matter. It was not his fault that, from the moment of his ar¬ 
rival in the parish, Ilenslowe had made him the target of a 
vulgar and imbittered hostility, and so far as he had struck 
out in return it had been for the protection of persecuted and 
defenseless creatures. But all the same, he could not get the 
thought of the man’s collapse and humiliation out of his mind, 
flow at his age was he to find other work, and how was he to 
endure life at Murewell without his comfortable house. Ids 


344 


ROBERT ELSMERE, 


smart gig, his eas}^ command of spirits, and the cringing of 
the farmers ? 

Tormented by the sordid misery of tlie situation almost as 
though it had been his own, Elsmere ran down impulsively in 
the evening to the agent’s house. Could nothing be done to 
assure the man that he was not really his enemy, and that 
anything the parson’s influence and the parson’s money could 
do to help him to a more decent life, and work which oifered 
fewer temptations and less power over human beings, should 
be done ? 

It need hardly be said that the visit was a complete failure. 
ITenslowe, who was drinking hard, no sooner heard Elsmere’s 
voice in the little hall than he dashed open the door which 
separated them, and, in a paroxysm of drunken rage, hurled 
at Elsmere all the venomous stuff he had been garnering up 
for months against some such occasion. The vilest abuse, the 
foulest charges—there was nothing that the maddened sot, 
now fairly unmasked, denied himself. Elsmere, pale and 
erect, tried to make himself heard. In vain. Ilenslowe was 
physically incapable of taking in a word. 

At last the agent, beside himself, made a rush, his three 
untidy children, who had been hanging open-mouthed in the 
background, set up a howl of terror, and his Scotch wife, 
more pinched and sour than ever, who had been so far a 
gloomy spectator of the scene, interposed. 

“ Have doon wi’ ye,” she said sullenly, putting out a long 
bony arm in front of her husband, “ or I’ll just lock oop that 
brandy where ye’ll naw find it if ye pull the house doon. Now, 
sir,” turning to Elsmere, would ye jest be going? Ye mean 
it weel, I daur say, but ye’ve doon yer wark, and ye maun 
leave it.” 

And she motioned him out, not without a somber dignity. 
Elsmere went home crestfallen. The enthusiast is a good 
deal too apt to under-estimate the stubbornness of moral fact, 
and these rebuffs have their stern uses for character. 

“ They intend to go on living here, I am told,” Elsmere 
said, as he wound up the story, “ and as Henslowe is still 
church-warden, he may do us a world of mischief yet. How¬ 
ever, I think that wife will keep him in order. No doubt 
vengeance would be sweet to her as to him, but she has a 
shrewd eye, poor soul, to the squire’s remittances. It is a 
wretched business, and I don’t take a man’s hate easily, 
Catherine !—though it may be a folly to say so.” 

(’atherine was irresponsive. The Old Testament element in 
her found a lawful satisfaction in Henslowe’sfall, and a Avicked 


liOBEUT ELISMERE. 


345 


man’s liatred, according to her, mattered only to himself, 
Tlie squire’s conduct, on the other hand, made her uneasily 
proud. To her, naturally, it simply meant that he was falling 
under Robert’s spell, ^o much the better for him, but— 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

That same afternoon Robert started on a walk to a distant 
farm, where one of his Sunday-school boys lay recovering 
from rheumatic fever, ddie rector had his pocket full of 
articles—a story-book in one, a puzzle map in the other— 
destined for Master Carter’s amusement. On the waj^ he was 
to pick up Mr. AVendover at the pai’k gates. 

It was a delicious April morning. A soft west wind blew 
through leaf and grass : 

“Driving sweet buds, like flocks, to feed in air.” 

The spring was stirring everywhere, and Robert raced along, 
feeling in every vein a life, an ebullience akin to that of nature. 
As he neared the place of meeting it occurred to him that the 
squire had been unusually busy lately, unusuall}^ silent and 
absent too on their walks. AVhat loas he always at work on 
Robert had often inquired of him as to the nature of those 
])iles of pi’oof and manuscript with which his table was littered. 
The squire had never given any but the most general answer, 
and had always changed the subject. There was an invincible 
•personal reserve about him which, through all his walks and 
talks with Elsmere, had never as yet broken down. lie would 
talk of other men and other men’s labors by the hour, but not 
of his own. Elsmere reflected on the fact, mingling with the 
reflection a certain humorous scorn of his own constant 
openness and readiness to take counsel with the woi*ld. 

“ However, his book isn’t a mere excuse, as Langham’s is,” 
Elsmere inwardly remarked. “ Langham, in a certain sense, 
plays even with learning ; Mr. AVendoA^er plays at nothing.” 

Hy the way, he had a letter from Langham in his pocket 
much more cheerful and human than usual. Let him look 
through it again. 

Not a word, of course, of that National Gallery experience!— 
a circumstance, however, Avhich threw no light on it either 
way, 

“I find mA^self a good deal reconciled to life by thisraigra- 
tion'of mine,” wrote Langham. “ Noav that my enforced duties 
to them are all done with, my fellow-creatures seem to me 
inucii more decent fellows than before. The great stir of Lon¬ 
don, in which, unless I t^lease, I have no part whatever, at- 


34G 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


tracts me more than I could have thought possible. No one in 
these noisy streets has any rightful claim upon me. I have 
cut away at one stroke lectures, and Boards of Studies, and 
tutors’ meetings, and all the rest of the wearisome Oxford 
make-believe, and the creature left behind feels lighter and 
nimbler than he has felt for years. I go to concerts and thea¬ 
ters ; I look at the people in the street ; I even begin to take 
an outsider’s interest in social questions, in the puny dykes 
which well-meaning people are trying to raise all round us 
against tlie encroaching, devastating labor-troubles of the 
future. By dint of running away from life, I may end by cut¬ 
ting a much more passable figure in it than before. Be con¬ 
soled, ni}^ dear Elsmere ; reconsider your remonstrances.” 

There, under the great cedar by the gate, stood Mr. Wend- 
over. Illumined as he was by the spring sunshine, he struck 
Elsmere as looking unusually shrunken and old. And yet un¬ 
der the look of ])hysical exhaustion there was a new serenity, 
almost a peacefulness of expression, which gave the whole 
man a different aspect. 

“ Don’t take me far,” he said abruptly, as they started. 
“ I have not got the energy for it. I have been overworking, 
and must go away.” 

“1 have been sure of it for some time,” said Elsmere warm- 
“ You ought to have a long rest. But mayn’t I know, 
Mr. Wendover, before you take it, what this great task is you 
have boon toiling at ? Remember, you have never told me a 
word of it.” 

And Elsmere’s smile had in it a touch of most friendl}^ re¬ 
proach. Eatigue had left the scholar relaxed, com|)aratively 
defenseless. Ilis sunk and wrinkled eyes lighted up with a 
smile, faint indeed, but of unwonted softness. 

“A task indeed,” he said with a sigh ; “the task of a life¬ 
time. To-day I finished the second third of it. Probably be¬ 
fore the last section is begun some interloping German will 
have ste])ped down before me; it is the way of the race! But 
for the moment there is the satisfaction of having come to an 
end of some sort—a natural halt, at any rate.” 

Elsmere’s eyes were still interrogative. “Oh, well,” said 
the squire hastily, “ it is a book I planned just after I took my 
doctor’s degree at Berlin. It struck me then as the great watit 
of modern scholarship. It is a History of Evidence, or rather, 
more strictly, ‘ A History of Testimony.'’ ” 

Robert started. The library flashed into his mind, and 
Langham’s figure in the long gray coat sitting on the stool. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


347 


“ A great subject,” he said slowly, “ a magnificent subject. 
IIow have you conceived it, I wonder ? ” 

“Simply from the standpoint of evolution, of development. 
• The philosophical value of the subject is enormous. You must 
have considered it, of course; every historian must. But few 
people have any idea in detail of the amount of light which the 
history of human witness in the world, systematically carried 
through, throws on the history of the human mind; that is to 
say, on the history of ideas.” 

Tlie squire paused, his keen, scrutinizyig look dwelling on the 
face beside him, as though to judge whether he were under¬ 
stood. 

“ Oh, true! ” cried Elsmere; “ most true. Now I know what 
vague want it is that has been haunting me for months—” 

He stopped short, his look aglow with all the young think¬ 
er’s ardor, fixed on the squire. 

The squire received the outburst in silence’—a somewhat am¬ 
biguous silence. 

“But, go on,” said Elsmere; “ please go on.” 

“Well, you remember,” said the squire slowly, “that when 
Tractarianisni began I was for a time one of NeAvman’s vic¬ 
tims. Then, when Newman departed, I went over body and 
bones to the Liberal reaction which followed his going. In 
the first ardor of what seemed to me a release from slaveiy I 
migrated to Berlin, in search of knowledge which there was no 
getting in England, and there, with the taste of a dozen aim¬ 
less theological controversies still in my mouth, this idea first 
took hold of me. It was simply this : Could one through an 
exhaustive examination of liiiman records, helped by modern 
j)hysiological and mental science, get at the conditions, physi¬ 
cal and mental, which govern the greater or lesser correspond¬ 
ence between human witness and the fact it reports?” 

“ A giant’s task ! ” cried Robert ; “ hardly conceivable ! ” 

Tlie squire smiled slightly—the smile of a man who looks 
back with indulgent, half-melancholy satire on the rash ambi¬ 
tions of his youth. 

“ Naturally,” he resumed, “ I soon saw I must restrict myself 
to European testimony, and that only up to the Renaissance. 
To do that, of course, I had to dig into the East, to learn sev¬ 
eral Oriental languages—Sanskrit among them. Hebrew I 
already knew. Then, when I had got my languages, I began 
to work steadily through the whole mass of existing records, 
sifting and comparing. It is thirty years since I started. 
Fifteen years ago 1 finished the section dealing with classical 
antiqpity—with India, lYrsia, Egypt, and JudaBa. To-day I 


348 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


liave put the last strokes to a History of Testimony fi-om the 
Christian era down to the sixth century—from Livy to Gregory 
of Tours, from Augustus to Justinian.” 

Elsmere turned to him with wonder, Avith a movement of 
irrepressible homage. Thirty years of unbroken solitaiy labor 
for one end, one cause. In our hurried fragmentary life a 
purpose of this tenacity, this power of realizing itself, strikes 
the imagination. 

“ And your tw'O books ? ” 

“ Were a mere interlude,” replied the squire briefly. “ After 
the completion of the fir's:: part of my work there were certain 
deposits left in me which it was a relief to get rid of, especially 
in connection with my renewed impressions of England,” he 
added dryly. 

Elsmere was silent, thinking this then was the exjdanation 
of the squire’s minute and exhaustive knowledge of the early 
Christian centuries, a knoAvledge into which—apart from cer¬ 
tain forbidden topics—he had himself dipped so freel 3 ^ Sud¬ 
denly, as he mused, there awoke in the j^oung man a new 
hunger, a new unmanageable impulse toward h-ankness of 
speech. All his nascent intellectual powers Avere alAe and 
clamorous. For the moment his past reticences and timidities 
looked to him absurd. The mind rebelled against the barriers 
it had been rearing against itself. It rushed on to sweep them 
away, ciying out that all this shrinking from free discussion 
had been at bottom “ a mere treason to faith.” 

“ Naturally, Mr. WendoA^er,” he said at last, and his tone 
had a half-defiant, half-nervous energ^q “ you have given your 
best attention all these years to the Christian problems.” 

“ Naturally",” said the squire drylj^ Then, as his companion 
still seemed to wait, keenl}^ expectant, he resumed, Avith some¬ 
thing cynical in the smile Avhich accompanied the Avords : 

“But I have no Avish to infringe our convention.” 

“ A convention, was it ? ” replied Elsmere, flushing. “ I think 
I only Avanted to make my OAvn position clear and prevent mis¬ 
understanding. But it is impossible that I should be indifferent 
to the results of thirty years’ such w^ork as you can give to so 
great a subject.” 

The squire drew himself up a little under his cloak and 
seemed to consider. His tired eyes, fix^d on the spring lane 
before them, saAV in realit}’' onl}^ the long retrospects of the 
past. Then a light broke in them, transformed them—a light 
of battle. He turned to the man beside him, and his sharp 
look swept over him from head to foot. Well, if he Avould 
have it, let him have it. He had been contemptuously content 


* ROBERT ELSMERE. 


349 


so far to let the subject be. But Mr. Wendover, in spite of his 
philosophy, had never been proof all his life against an anti¬ 
clerical instinct worthy almost of a Paris municipal councilor. 
In spite of his fatigue there woke in him a kind of cruel, whim¬ 
sical pleasure at the notion of speaking, once for all, wluit 
lie conceived to be the whole bare truth to this clever, 
attractive dreamer, to the young fellow who thought he could 
condescend to science from the standpoint of the Christian 
miracles ! 

“Results?” he said interrogatively. “Well, as you will 
understand, it is tolerably difficult to summarize such a mass 
at a moment’s notice. But I can give you the lines of 1113^ last 
volumes, if it would interest you to hear them.” 

The walk prolonged itself far beyond Mr. Wendover’s orig¬ 
inal intention. There was something in the situation, in 
Elsmere’s comments, or arguments, or silences, which after a 
while banished the scholar’s isense of exhaustion and made him 
oblivious of the country distances. No man feels another’s 
soul quivering and struggling in his grasp without excitement, 
let his nerve and his self-restraint be what they may. 

As for Elsmere, that hour and a half, little as he realized it 
at the time, represented the turning-point of life. lie listened, 
he suggested, he put in an acute remark here, an argument 
there, such as the squire had often difficulty in meeting. 
Every now and then the inner protest of an attacked faith 
would breakthrough in words so full of poignancy, in imageiy 
so dramatic, that the squire’s closely knit sentences would be 
for the moment wholly disarranged. On the whole, he proved 
himself no mean guardian of all that was most sacred to him¬ 
self and to Catherine, and the squire’s intellectual respect for 
him rose considerably. 

All the same, ly the end of their conversation that first 
period of happy unclouded youth we have been considering 
was over for poor Elsmere. In obedience to certain inevitable 
laws and instincts of the mind, he had been for months tempt¬ 
ing his fate, inviting catastrophe. None the less did the first 
sure approaches of that catastrophe fill him with a restless re¬ 
sistance which was in itself anguish. 

As to the squire’s talk, it Avas simply the outpouring of one 
of the richest, most skeptical, and most highly trained of 
minds on the subject of Christian origins. At no previous 
])ei-iod of his life would it have greatly affected Elsmere. But 
noAV at e\'eiy step the ideas, impressions, arguments bred in 
him ly his months of historical work and ordinary converse 
Avith the squii-e rushed in, as they had done once before, to 


350 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


cripple resistance, to check an emerging answer, to justify Mr. 
Wendover. 

We may quote a few fragmentary utterances taken almost 
at random from the long wrestle of the two men, for the sake 
of indicating the main lines of a bitter after-struggle. 

“Testimony like every other human product has developed. 
]\Ian’s power of apprehending and recording what he sees and 
hears has grown from less to more, from weaker to stronger, 
like any other of his faculties, just as the reasoning powers of 
the cave-dweller have developed into the reasoning powers of 
a Kant. What one wants is the ordered proof of this, and it 
can be got from history and experience.” 

“ To plunge into the Christian period without having first 
cleared the mind as to what is mesmt in history and literature 
by ‘ the critical method,’ which in history may be defined as 
the ‘ science of what is credible,’ and in literature as ‘ the 
science of what is rational,’ is to invite fiasco. The theologian 
in such a state sees no obstacle to accepting an arbitrary list of 
documents with all the strange stuff they may contain, and 
declaring them to be sound historical material, while he applies 
to all the strange stuff of a similar kind surrounding them the 
most rigorous principles of modern science. Or he has to 
make believe that the reasoning processes exhibited in the 
speeches of the Acts, in certain passages of St. Paul’s Epistles, 
or in the Old Testament quotations in the Gospels, have a 
validity for the mind of the nineteenth century, when in truth 
they are the imperfect, half-childish products of the mind of 
the first century, of quite insignificant or indirect value to the 
historian of fact, of enormous value to the historian of testi¬ 
mony 2 ,\\^ its varieties.” 

“ Suppose, for instance, before I begin to deal with the 
Christian story, and the earliest Christian development, I try 
to make out beforehand what are the molds, the channels into 
which the testimony of the time must run. I look for these 
molds, of course, in the dominant ideas, the intellectual pre¬ 
conceptions and preoccupations existing when the period 
begins. 

“ In the first place, I shall find present in the age which saw 
the birth of Christianity, as in so many other ages, a universal 
])reconception in favor of miracle—that is to say, of deviations 
from the common norm of experience, governing the work of 
all men of all schools. Very well, allow for it then. Read 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


351 


tlie testimony of the period in the light of it. Be pre})ared 
for the inevitable differences between it and the testimony of 
your own day. The witness of the time is not true, nor, in 
the strict sense, false. It is merely incompetent, half-trained, 
scientific, but all through perfectly natural. The wonder would 
have been to have had a life of Christ without miracles. The 
air teems with them. The East is full of Messiahs. Even a 
Tacitus is superstitious. Even a Vespasian works miracles. 
Even a Nero can not die, but fifty years after his death is still 
looked for as the inaugurator of a millennium of horror. The 
Kesurrectioii is partly invented, partly imagined, partly 
ideally true—in any case wholly intelligible and natural, as a 
product of the age, when once you have the key of that age. 

“ In the next place, look for the preconceptions that have a 
definite historical origin ; those, for instance, flowing from the 
pre-Christian, apocalyptic literature of the Jews, taking the 
Maccbaean legend of Daniel as the center of inquiry—those 
flowing from Alexandrian Judaism and the school of Philo— 
those flowing from the Palestinian schools of exegesis. Ex¬ 
amine your synoptic gospels, your Gospel of St. John, your 
Apocal^^pse, in the light of these. You have no other chance 
of understanding them. But so examined, they fall into place, 
become explicable and rational ; such material as science can 
make full use of. The doctrine of the Divinity of Christ, 
Christian eschatolog}^ and Christian views of prophecy will 
also have found their place in a sound historical scheme ! ” 

“ It is discreditable now for the man of intelligence to refuse 
to read his Livy in the light of his Mommsen. My object has 
been to help in making it discreditable to him to refuse to read 
his Christian documents in the light of a trained scientific 
ci’iticism. We shall have made some positive advance in ration¬ 
ality wlien the man who is perfectly capable of dealing sanely 
witii legend in one connection, and, in another, will insist on 
confounding it with history proper, can not do so any longer 
without losing caste, without falling ipso facto out of court 
with men of education. It is enough for a man of letters if 
he has helped ever so little in the final staking out of the 
boundaries between reason and unreason ! ” 

And so on. These are mere ragged gleanings from an ample 
store. The discussion in reality ranged over the whole field 
of history, plunged into philosophy, and into the subtlest 
pi’oblems of mind. At the end of it, after he had been con¬ 
scious for many bitter moments of that same constriction of 
heart which had overtaken him once before at IMr. Wendover’s 


ROBliRT ELSMERE. 


Oc) J 

Lands, tlie religious passion in Elsinere once more rose with 
sudden stubborn energy against the iron negations pressed 
ui)on it. 

“ I will not fight you anymore, Mr. Wendover,” he said, 
with his moved, fiashing look. “ I am perfectly conscious 
that my own mental experience of the last two years has made 
it necessary to re-examine some of these intellectual founda¬ 
tions of faith. But as to the faith itself, that is its own wit¬ 
ness. It does not depend, after all, upon anything external, 
but upon the living voice of the Eternal in the soul of man ! ” 

Involuntarily his pace quickened. The whole man Avas 
gathered into one great, useless, pitiful defiance, and the 
outer Avorld was forgotten. The squire kept up Avith difficulty 
awhile, a faint glimmer of sarcasm playing now and then round 
the straight, thin-lipped mouth. Then suddenly he stopped. 

“ No, let it be. Forget me and my book, Elsmere. Every¬ 
thing can be got out of in this world. the Ava^q Ave seem 

to have reached the ends of the earth. Those are the ncAV 
Mile End cottages, I believe. With your leaA^e, I’ll sit doAvn 
in one of them, and send to the Hall for the carriage.” 

Elsmere’s repentant attention was drawn at once to his 
companion. 

‘‘ I am a selfish idiot,” he said hotly, to have led you into 
overAvalking and overtalking like this.” 

The squire made some short reply and instantly turned the 
matter off. The momentary softness which had marked his 
meeting Avith Elsmere had entirely vanished, leaving only the 
Mr. Wendover of every dajq who was merely made awkward 
and unapproachable by the slightest touch of personal sym¬ 
pathy. No living being, certainly not his foolish little sister, 
had any right to take care of the squire. And as the signs of 
age became more apparent, this one fact had often Avorked 
poAverfully on the sympathies of Elsmere’s chivalrous youth, 
though as yet he had been no more capable than any one else 
of breaking through the squire’s haughty reserve. 

As they turned doAvn the neAvly Avorn track to the cottages, 
Avhereof the weekly progress had been for some time the de¬ 
light of Elsmere’s heart, they met old Meyrick in his pony- 
carriage. He stopped his shambling steed at sight of the pair. 
The bleared, spectacled eyes lighted up, the prim mouth broke 
into a smile Avhich matched the April sun. 

“Well, squire ; Avell, Mr. Elsmere, are you going to have a 
look at those places ? Never saw such palaces. I only hope 
I may end my daj^s in anything so good. Will you give me 
a lease, squire ? ” 


ROBERT BL8MERE. 


353 


Mr. Wendover’s deep eyes took a momentary survey, half 
indulgent, half contemptuous, of the naive, awkward-looking 
old creature in the pony-carriage. Then, without troubling 
to find an answer, he went his way. 

Robert stayed chatting a moment or two, knowing perfectly 
well what Meyrick’s gay garrulity meant. A sharp and bitter 
sense of the ironies of life swept across him. The squire hu¬ 
manized, influenced by him—he knew that was the image in 
Meyrick’s mind ; he remembered with a quiet scorn its pres¬ 
ence in his own. And never, never had he felt his own weak¬ 
ness and the strength of that grim personality so much as at 
that instant. 

That evening Catherine noticed an unusual silence and de¬ 
pression in Robert. Slie did her best to cheer it away, to get 
at the cause of it. In vain. At last, with her usual wise ten¬ 
derness, she left him alone, conscious herself, as she closed the 
study door behind her, of a momentary dreariness of soul, 
coming she knew not whence, and only dispersed by the in¬ 
stinctive upward leap of prayer. 

Robert was no sooner alone than he put down his pipe and 
sat brooding over the fire. All the long debate of the after¬ 
noon began to fight itself out again in the shrinking mind. 
Suddenljq in his relentless pain, a thought occurred to him. He 
had been much struck in the squire’s conversation by certain 
allusions to arguments drawn from the Book of Daniel. It 
was not a subject with which Robert had any great familiar¬ 
ity. He remembered his Pusey dimly, certain Divinity lec¬ 
tures, an article of Westcott’s. 

He raised his hand quickly and took down the monograph 
on The Use of the Old Testament in the Hew,” which the 
squire had sent him in the earliest days of their acquaintance. 
A sacred dread and repugnance had held him from it till now. 
Curiously enough it was not he but Catherine, as we shall see, 
Avlio had opened it first. How, however, he got it down and 
turned to the section on Daniel. 

It was a change of conviction on the subject of the date and 
autliorship of this strange product of Jewish patriotism in the 
second century before Christ that drove M. Renan out of the 
Church of Rome. “ For the Catholic Church to confess,” he 
says in his “ Souvenirs,” ‘‘ that Daniel is an apocryphal book 
of the time of the Maccabees, would be to confess that she had 
made a mistake ; if she had made this mistake she may have 
made others ; she is no longer divinely inspired.” 

The Protestant, who is in truth more bound to the Book of 
Daniel than M. Renan, has various ways of getting over the 


§54 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


difficulties raised against the supposed authorship of the book 
by modern criticism. Robert found all these ways enumerated 
in the brilliant and vigorous pages of the book before him. 

In the first place, like the orthodox Saint-Sulpicien, the 
Protestant meets the critic with a fiat no7i posswnus. “ Your 
arguments are useless and irrelevant,” he says in effect. 
“ However plausible may be your objections, the Book of 
Daniel is what it professes to be, because our Lord quoted it in 
such a manner as to distinctly recognize its authority. Tlie 
All-True and All-Knowing can not have made a mistake, nor 
can he have expressly led his disciples to regard as genuine 
ail'd divine, prophecies which were in truth the inventions of 
an ingenious romancer.” 

But the liberal Anglican—the man, that is to say, whose 
logical sense is inferior to his sense of literary probabilities— 
proceeds quite differently. 

“Your arguments are perfectly just,” he says to the critic ; 
“ the book is a patriotic fraud, of no value except to the his¬ 
torian of literature. But how do you know that our Lord 
quoted it as true in the strict sense ? In fact he quoted it as 
literature, as a Greek might have quoted Homer, as an Eng¬ 
lishman might quote Shakespeare.” 

And many an harassed Churchman takes refuge forthwith in 
the new explanation. It is very difficult, no doubt, to make 
the passages in the Gospels agree with it, but at the bottom 
of his mind there is a saving, silent scorn for the old theories 
of inspiration. He admits to himself that probably Christ was 
not correctly reported in the matter. 

Then appears the critic, having no interests to serve, no 
parti pris to defend, and states the matter calmly, dispassion¬ 
ately, as it appears to him. “ No reasonable man,” says the 
ablest German exponent of the Book of Daniel, “ can doubt ” 
—that this most interesting piece of writing belongs to the 
year 169 or 170 b.c. It was written to stir up the courage 
and patriotism of the Jews, weighed down by the persecutions 
of Antiochus Epiphanes. It had enormous vogue. It inaugu¬ 
rated a new Apocalyptic literature. And clearly the youth of 
Jesus of Nazareth was vitally influenced by it. It entered 
into his thought, it helped to shape his career. 

But Elsmere did not trouble himself much with the critic, 
as at any rate he was reported by the author of the book be¬ 
fore him. Long before the critical case was reached he had 
flung the book heavily from him. The mind accomplished jts 
further task without hel]) from outside. In the stillness of the 
night there rose up Aveirdly before him a whole new mental 


ROBEUT ELSMERE. 


355 


picture—effacing, pushing out, innumerable older Images of 
thought. It was the image of a purely human Christ—a purely 
human, explicable, yet always wonderful Christianity. It 
broke his heart, but the spell of it was like some dream- 
country wherein we see all the familiar objects of life in new 
relations and perspectives. He gazed upon it fascinated, the 
wailing underneath checked awhile by the strange beauty and 
order of the emerging spectacle. Only a little while. Then 
with a groan Elsmere looked up, his eyes worn, his lips white 
and set. 

“ I must face it—I must face it through ! God help me ! ” 

A slight sound overhead in Catherine’s room sent a sudden 
spasm of feeling through the young face. He threw himself 
down, hiding from his own foresight of what was to be. 

“ My darling, my darling ! But she shall know nothing of 
it—yet.” 

CHAPTER XXV. 

And he did face it through. 

The next three months were the bitterest months of Elsmere’s 
life. They were marked by anguished mental struggle, by a 
consciousness of painful separation from the soul nearest to his 
own, and by a constantly increasing sense of oppression, of 
closing avenues and narrowing alternatives, which for weeks 
together seemed to liold the mind in a grip Avhence there was 
no escape. 

That struggle was not hurried and imbittered by the bodily 
presence of the squire. Mr. Wendover went off to Italy a few 
days after the conversation we have described. But though he 
was not present in the flesh the great book of his life was in 
Elsmere’s hands, he had formal!}^ invited Elsmere’s remarks 
upon it ; and the air of Murewell seemed still echoing with his 
sentences, still astir with his thoughts. That curious instinct 
of pursuit, that avid, imperious wish to crush an irritating re¬ 
sistance, which his last walk with Elsmere had first awakened 
in him with any strength, persisted. He wrote to Robert from 
abroad, and the proud, fastidious scholar had never taken more 
pains with anything than with those letters. 

Robert might have stopped them, might have cast the whole 
matter from him with one resolute effort. In other relations 
he had will enough and to spare. 

Was it an unexpected weakness of fiber that made it impos¬ 
sible ?—that had placed him in this way at the squire’s disposal? 
Half the world would answer yes. Might not the other half 
plead that in every generation there is a minority of these mo- 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


S5G 

bile, impressionable, defenseless natures, who are ultimately at 
the mercy of experience, at the mercy of thought, at the mercy 
(shall we say ?) of truth ; and that, in fact, it is from this 
minority that all human advance comes? 

During these three miserable months it can not be said—poor 
Elsmere !—that he attempted any systematic study of Christian 
evidence. His mind was too much torn, his heart too sore. 
He pounced feverishly on one test point after another, on the 
Pentateuch, the Prophets, the relation of the New Testament 
to the thoughts and beliefs of its time, the Gospel of St. John, 
the evidence as to the Resurrection, the intellectual and moral 
conditions surrounding the formation of the Canon. His mind 
swayed hither and thither, driven from each resting-place in 
turn by the pressure of some new difficulty. And—let it be 
said again—all through, the only constant element in the whole 
dismal process was his trained historical sense. If he had gone 
through this conflict at Oxford, for instance, he would have 
come out of it unscathed ; for he would simply have remained 
throughout it ignorant of the true problems at issue. As it was, 
the keen instrument he had sharpened so laboriously on indif¬ 
ferent material now plowed its agonizing way, bit by bit, into 
the most intimate recesses of thought and faith. 

Much of the actual struggle he was able to keep from Cather¬ 
ine’s view, as he had vowed to himself to keep it. For after the 
squire’s departure Mrs. Darcy too went jo 3 'ously up to London 
to flutter awhile through the golden alleys of Mayfair ; and Els¬ 
mere was left once more in undisturbed possession of the Mure- 
well library. Tliere for awhile on every day—oh, pitiful relief ! 
—he could hide himself from the eyes he loved. 

But, after all, married love allows of nothing but the shallow¬ 
est concealments. Catherine had alread}^ liad one or two alarms. 
Once, in Robert’s stud}^, among a tumbled mass of books he' 
had pulled out in search of something missing, and which she 
Avas putting in order, she had come across that veiy book on 
the Prophecies which at a critical moment had so deeplj^ affect¬ 
ed Elsmere. It la^^ open, and Catherine was caught by the 
heading of a section : “ The Messianic Idea.” 

She began to read, mechanicall\^ at first, atid read about a 
page. That page so shocked a mind accustomed to a purely 
traditional and nystical interpretation of the Bible that the 
book dropped abruptl}^ from her hand, and she stood a moment 
by her husband’s table, her fine face pale and frowning. 

She noticed with bitterness Mr. Wendover’s name on the 
title-page. Was it right for Robert to have such books? 
W as it wise, was it prudent, for the Christian to measure 


ROBERT. ELSMERE. 


857 


liimself against such antagonism as tliis ? She wrestled ])ain- 
fiill}'' with the question. “ Oh, but I can’t understand,” she 
said to herself, with an almost agonized energy. “ It is I 
who am timid, faithless ! He ?7ius (—he must —know what 
they say ; he must have gone through the dark places if he is 
to carry others through them.” 

So she stilled and trampled on the inward protest. She 
yearned to speak of it to Robert, but something withheld her. 
In her passionate wifely trust she could not bear to seem to 
question the use he made of his time and thought; and a deli¬ 
cate moral scruple warned her she might easily allow her dis¬ 
like of the Wendover friendship to lead her into exaggeration 
and injustice. 

But the stab of that moment recurred—dealt now by one 
slight incident, now by another. And after the squire s de¬ 
parture Catherine suddenly realized that the whole atmosphere 
of their home-life was changed. 

Robert was giving himself to his people with a more scru¬ 
pulous energy than ever. Never had she seen him so pitiful, 
so full of heart for every human creature. His sermons, with 
their constant imaginative dwelling on the earthly life of 
Jesus, affected her now with a poignancy, a pathos, which 
were almost unbearable. And his tenderness to /ler was beyond 
words. But with that tenderness there was constantly mixed 
a note of remorse, a painful self-depreciation which she could 
hardly notice in speech, but which every now and then wrung 
her heart. And in his parish work he oft^n showed a depres¬ 
sion, an irritability, entirely new to her. He who had always 
the happiest power of forgetting to-morrow all the rubs of to¬ 
day, seemed now quite incapable of saving himself and his 
cheerfulness in the old ways,—nay, had developed a capacity 
for sheer worry she had never seen in him before. And mean¬ 
while all the old gossips of the place spoke their mind freely 
to Catherine on the subject of the rector’s looks, coupling their 
remarks with a variety of prescriptions, out of which Robert 
did sometimes manage to get one of his old laughs. His 
sleeplessness, too, which had always been a constitutional ten¬ 
dency, had become now so constant and wearing that Cath¬ 
erine began to feel a nervous hatred of his book-work, and of 
those long mornings at the Hall; a passionate wish to put an 
end to it, and carry him away for a holiday. 

But he would not hear of the holiday, and he could hardly 
bear any talk of hitnself. And Catherine had been brought 
up in a school of feeling which bade love be veiy scrupulous, 
very delicate, and which recognized in the strongest way the 


358 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


right of every human soul to its own privacy, its own reserves. 
That something definite troubled him she was certain. AVhat 
it was he clearly avoided telling her, and she could not hurt 
him by impatience. 

He would tell her soon—when it was right—;she cried piti¬ 
fully to herself. Meanwhile both suffered, she not knowing why, 
clinging to each other the Avhile more passionately than ever. 

One night, however, coming down in her dressing-gown 
into the study in search of a “Christian Year” she had left 
behind her, she found Robert with paj^ers strewn before 
him, his arms on the table and his head laid down upon them. 
He looked up as she came in, and the expression of his eyes 
drew her to him irresistibly. 

“ Were you asleep, Robert ? Do come to bed ! ” 

He sat up, and with a pathetic gesture held out his arms to 
her. She came on to his knee, putting her white arms round 
his neck, while he leaned his head against her breast. 

“ Are you tired with all your walking to-day ? ” she said 
presently, a pang at her heart. 

“I am tired,” he said, “but not with walking.” 

“ Does your book worry you ? You shouldn’t work so hard, 
Robert—you shouldn’t! ” 

lie started. 

“ Don’t talk of it. Don’t let us talk or think at all, only 
feel ! ” 

And he tightened his arms round her, happy once more for 
a moment in this environment of a perfect love. There was 
silence for a few moments, Catherine feeling more and more 
disturbed and anxious. 

“ Think of your mountains,”’ he said presently, his eyes still 
pressed against her, “ of High Fell, and the moonlight, and 
the house where Mary Backhouse died. Oh ! Catherine, I 
see you still, and shall always see you, as I saw you then, my 
angel of healing and of grace ! ” 

“ I too have been thinking of her to-night,” said Catherine, 
softl}^, “ and of the walk to Shanmoor. This evening in the 
garden it seemed to me as though there were Westmoreland 
scents in the air ! I was haunted by a vision of bracken, and 
rocks, and sheep browsing up the fell slopes.” 

“ Oh for a breath of the wind on High Fell ! ” cried Robert 
—^^it was so new to her, the dear voice with this accent in it of 
yearning depression ! “ I want more of the spirit of the mount¬ 
ains, their serenity, their strength. Say me that Duddon son¬ 
net you used to say to me there, as you said it to me that last 
Sunday before our wedding, when we walked up the Slianmoor 


ROBEUT ELSMERE. 


359 


road to say good-by to that blessed spot. Oh ! liow I sit and 
think of it sometimes, when life seems to be going crookedly, 
that rock on the fell-side where I found you, and caught you, 
and snared you, my dove, forever.” 

And Catherine, whose mere voice was as balm to this man of 
man}^ impulses, repeated to him, softl}^, in the midnight silence, 
those noble lines in which Wordsworth has expressed, with the 
reserve and yet the strength of the great poet, the loftiest 
yearning of the purest hearts : 

“ Enough, if something from our hand have power 
To live and move, and serve the future hour, 

And if, as toward the ’silent tomb we go, 

Through love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower, 

We feel that we are greater than we know.” 

“ He has divined it all,” said Robert, drawing a long breath 
when she stopped, which seemed to relax the fibers of the inner 
man, “ the fever and the fret of human thought, the sense of 
littleness, of impotence, of evanescence—and he has soothed 
it all ! ” 

“ Oh, not all, not all ! ” cried Catherine, her look kindling, 
and her rare passion breaking through ; “ how little in com¬ 
parison ! ” 

For her thoughts ’were with Him of whom it was said : He 
needed not that any one should hear witness concerning man, 
for he knew what was hi manR But Robert’s only response 
was silence and a kind of quivering sigh. 

“ Robert! ” she cried, pressing her cheek against his temple, 

tell me, my dear, dear husband, w^hat it is troubles you. 
Something does—I am certain—certain ! ” 

“ Catherine—wife beloved ! ” he said to her, after another 
pause, in a tone of strange tension she never forgot; “genera¬ 
tions of men and women have known what it is to be led spirit¬ 
ually into the desert, into that outer wilderness where even the 
Lord was ‘ tempted.’ What am I that I should claim to escape 
it ? And you can not come through it with me, my darling— 
no, not even you ! It is loneliness—it is solitariness itself—” 
and he shuddered. “ But pray for me—pray that He may be 
with me, and that at the end there may be light ! ” 

He pressed her to him convulsively, then gently released her. 
His solemn eyes, fixed upon her as she stood there beside liim, 
seemed to forbid her to say a word more. She stooped ; she 
laid her lips to his ; it was a meeting of soul with soul ; then 
she went softly out, breaking the quiet of the house by a stifled 
sob as she passed upstairs. 

Oh ! but at last she thought she understood him. She had 


SCO 


noBEliT BLSMERB. 


not passed her girlhood, side by side with a man of delicate 
fiber, of melancholy and scrupulous temperament, and within 
hearing of all the natural interests of a deeply religious mind, 
religious biography, religious psychology, and—within certain 
sharply defined limits—religious speculation, without being 
brought face to face with the black possibilities of “ doubts ” 
and “ difticulties ” as barriers in the Christian path. Has not 
almost every Christian of illustrious excellence been tried and 
humbled by them? Catherine, looking back upon her own 
youth, could remember certain crises of religious melancholy, 
during which she had often dropped off to sleep at night on a 
pillow wet with tears. Tliey had passed away quickly, and 
forever. But she went back to them now, straining her eyes 
through the darkness of her own past, recalling her father’s 
days of spiritual depression, and the few difficult words she had 
sometimes heard from him as to those bitter times of religious 
dryness and hopelessness, by which God chastens from time to 
time his most faithful and heroic souls. A half contempt 
awoke in her for the unclouded serenity and confidence of her 
own inner life. If her own spiritual experience had gone deeper, 
she told herself with the strangest self-blame, she would have 
been able now to understand Robert better—to help him more. 

She thought as she lay awake after those painful moments in 
the study, the tears welling up slowly in the darkness, of many 
things that had puzzled her in the past. She remembered the 
book she had seen on his table ; her thoughts traveled over his 
months of intercourse with the squire ; and the memory of Mr. 
Newconie’s attitude toward the man whom he conceived to be 
his Lord’s adversary, as contrasted with Robert’s, filled her 
with a shrinking pain she dared not analyze. • 

Still all through, her feeling toward her husband was in the 
main akin to that of the English civilian at home toward Eng¬ 
lish soldiers abroad, suffering and dying that England maybe 
great. She had sheltered herself all her life from those deadly 
forces of unbelief which exist in English society, by a steady 
refusal to know what, however, any educated university man 
must perforce know. But such a course of action was impos¬ 
sible for Robert. Tie had been forced into the open, into the 
full tide of the Lord’s battle. .The chances of that battle are 
many ; and the more courage the more risk of wounds and 
pain. But the great Captain knows—the great Captain does 
not forget his own. 

For never, never had she the smallest doubts as to the issue 
of this sudden crisis in her husband’s consciousness, even when 
she came nearest to apprehending its nature. As well might 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


361 


she doubt the return of daylight a:s dream of any permanent 
eclipse descending upon the faith which had shone through 
every detail of Robert’s ardent impulsive life, with all its strug¬ 
gles, all its failings, all its beauty, since she had known him 
Hrst. The dread did not even occur to her. In her agony of 
pity and reverence she thought of him as passing through a 
trial, which is specially the believer’s trial—the chastening by 
which God proves the soul he loves. Let her only love and 
trust in patience. 

So that day by day, as Robert’s depression still continued, 
C^atherine surrounded him with the tenderest and wisest affec¬ 
tion. Her quiet common-sense made itself heard, forbidding 
her to make too mucl^ of the change, in him, which might, after 
all, she thought, be partly explained by the mere physical re¬ 
sults of his long strain of body and mind during the Mile End 
epidemic. And for the rest she would not argue; she would not 
inquire. She only prayed that she might so lead the Christian 
life beside him, that the Lord's tenderness, the Lord’s consola¬ 
tion, might shine upon him through her. It had never been her 
wont to speak to him much about his own influence, his own 
effect, in the parish. To the austerer Christian considerations 
of this kind are forbidden : “It is not I,but Christ that work- 
eth in me.” But now, whenever she came across any striking 
trace of his power over the weak or the impure, the sick or the 
sad, she would in some way make it known to him, offering it 
to him in her delicate tenderness, as though it were a gift that 
the Father had laid in her hand for him—a token that the 
Master was still indeed with his servant, and that all was 
fundamentally well ! 

And so much, perhaps, the contact with his Avife’s faith, the 
power of her love, Avrought in Robert, that during these Aveeks 
and months he also never lost his own certainty of emergence 
from the shadow which had overtaken him. And, indeed, 
driven on from day to day as he Avas by an imperious intel¬ 
lectual thirst Avhich Avoiildbe satisfied, the religion of the heart, 
the imaginative emotional habit of years, that incessant drama 
Avhich the soul enacts with the divine powers to which it feels 
itself committed, lived and persisted through it all. Feeling 
Avas untouched. The heart was still passionately on the side of 
all its old loves and adorations, still blindly trustful that in the 
end, by some compromise as yet unseen, they Avould be restored 
to it intact. 

Sometime tOAvard the end of July Robert was coming home 
from the Hall before lunch, tired and Avorn, as the morning 
ahvayg left him, and meditating some fresh sheets of the 


362 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


squire’s proofs which had been in his hands that morning. On 
the road crossing that to the rectory he suddenly saw Reginald 
Newcome, thinner and whiter than ever, striding along as fast 
as cassock and cloak would let him, his eyes on the ground, 
and his wide-awake drawn over them. He and Elsmere had 
scarcely met for months, and Robert had lately made up his 
mind that Newcome was distinctly less friendly, and wished to 
show it. 

Elsmere had touched his arm before Rewcome had perceived 
any one near him ! Then he drew back with a start. 

“ Elsmere, you here ! I had an idea you were away for a 
holiday ! ” 

“ Oh, dear, no ! ” said Robert, smiling. “ I may get away in 
September, perhaps—not till then.” * 

“ Mr. Wendover at home ?” said the other, his eyes turning 
to the Hall, of which the chimneys were just visible from 
where they stood. 

No, he is abroad.” 

‘‘ You and he have made friends, I understand,” said the 
other, abruptljq his eagle look returning to Elsmere ; “ I hear 
of 3^011 as always together.” 

“We have made friends, and we walk a great deal when 
the squire is here,” said Robert, meeting Newcome’s harshness 
of tone with a bright dignity. “Mr. Wendover has even 
been doing something for us in the village. You should come 
and see the new institute. The roof is on, and we shall open 
it in August or September. The best building of the kind in 
the country by far, and Mr. AYendover’s gift.” 

“ I suppose you use the library a great deal ? ” said New- 
come, paying no attention to these remarks, and still eying 
his companion closely. 

“ A great deal.” 

Robert had at that moment under his arm a German treatise 
on the history of the Logos doctrine, which, afterwards, look¬ 
ing back on the little scene, he thought it probable Newcome 
recognized. They turned toward the rectoiy together. New- 
come still asking abrupt questions as to the squire, the length 
of time he was to be awajq Elsmere’s work, parochial and lit¬ 
erary, during the past six months, the numbers of his Sunday 
congregation, of his communicants, etc. Elsmere bore his 
catechism with perfect temper, though Newcome’s manner had 
in it a strange and almost judicial imperativeness. 

“ Elsmere,” said his questioner presentljq after a pause, “ I 
am going to have a retreat for priests at the Clergy House 
next month. Father H—,” mentioning a famous High 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


363 


Churchman, “ will conduct it. You would dome a special 
favor”—and suddenly the face softened, and. shone with all 
its old magnetism on Elsmere—“ if you would come. I believe 
you would find nothing to dislike in it, or in our rule, which is 
a most simple one.” 

Robert smiled, and laid his hand on the other’s arm. 

“No, Newcome, no ; I am in no mood for 11—.” 

The High Churchman looked at him with a quick and pain¬ 
ful anxiety visible in the stern eyes. 

“ Will you tell me what that means?” 

“ It means,” said Robert, clasping his hands tightly behind 
him, his pace slackening a little to meet that of Newcome— 
“ it means that if you will give me your prayers, Newcome, 
your companionship sometimes, your pity always, I will thank 
you from the bottom of my heart. But I am in a state just 
now when I must fight my battles for myself, and in God’s 
sight only ! ” 

It was the first burst of confidence which had passed his lips 
to any one but Catherine. 

Newcome stood still, a tremor of strong emotion running 
thi'ough the emaciated face. 

“ You are in trouble, Elsmere ; I felt it, I knew it, when I 
first saw you ! ” 

“ Yes, I am in trouble,” said Robert, quietly. 

“ Opinions ? ” 

“ Opinions, I suppose—or facts,” said Robert, his arms 
dropping wearil}^ beside him. “ Have you ever known what 
it is to be troubled in mind, I wonder, Newcome ? ” 

And he looked at his companion with a sudden pitiful curi¬ 
osity. 

A kind of flash passed over Mr. Newcome’s face. 

Have I ever known? ” he repeated, vaguely, and then he 
drew his thin hand, the hand of the ascetic and the mystic, 
hastily across his eyes, and was silent—his lips moving, his 
gaze on the ground, his whole aspect that of a man wrought 
out of himself by a sudden passion of memory. 

Robert watched him with surprise, and was just speaking, 
when Mr. Newcome looked up, every drawn attenuated feat¬ 
ure working painfully. 

“ Did you never ask yourself, Elsmere,” he said, slowly, 
“ what it was drove me from the bar and journalism to the 
East End ? Do you think I don’t know,” and his voice rose, 
his eyes flamed, “ what black devil it is that is gnawing at 
3 mur heart now ? Why, man, I have been through darker 
gulfs of hell than you have ever sounded ! Many a night I 


364 


ROBERT ELS}[ERE. 


have felt myself 7nad—mad of doitht —a castawaj’’ on a shore¬ 
less sea ; doubting not only God or (’hrist, but mj’-self, the 
soul, the very existence of good. I found only one way out 
of it, and you will find only one way.” 

The lithe hand caught Robert’s arm impetuously—the voice 
with its accent of fierce conviction was at his ear. 

“ Trample on yourself ! Pray down the demon, fast, scourge, 
kill the body, that the soul may live ! What are we, miserable 
worms, that we should defy the Most High, that we should 
set our wretched faculties against his Omnipotence ? Submit 
—submit—humble yourself, my brother ! Fling away the free¬ 
dom which is your ruin. Tliere is no freedom for man. Either 
a slave to Christ, or a slave to his own lusts—there is no other 
choice. Go away ; exchange your work here for a time for 
work in London. You have too much leisure here : Satan has 
too much opportunity. I foresaw it—I foresaw it when you 
and I first met. I felt I had a message for you, and here I de¬ 
liver it. In the Lord’s name, I bid you fly, bid you yield in 
time. Better to be the Lord’s captive than the Loi'd's be¬ 
trayer ! ” 

The wasted form was drawn up to its full height, the arm 
was outstretched, the long cloak fell back from it in long folds 
—voice and eye were majesty in itself. Robert had a tremor 
of responsive passion. How easy it sounded, how tempting, 
to cut the knot, to mutilate and starve the rebellious intellect 
which would assert itself agahist the soul’s purest instincts ! 
Newcome had done it—why not he ? 

And then, suddenly, as he stood gazing at his companion, 
the spring sun and murmur all about them, another face, an¬ 
other life, another message flashed on his inmost sense—the 
face and life of Henry Grey. Words torn from their context, 
but full for him of in tensest meaning, passed rapidly through 
his mind : “ God is not wisely ti'usted when dedai'ed iinintelli- 
(jibleR “ 8ueh honor rooted in dishonor stands ; stich faith 
unfaithfid snakes us falsely ti'ueB “ God is forever reason : 
and his communication^ his revelation^ is reasoiiB 

He turned away with a slight sad shake of the head. The 
spell was broken. Mr. Newcome’s arm dropped, and he moved 
somberly on beside Robert—the hand, which held a little Book 
of Hours against his cloak, trembling slightly. 

At the rectory gate he stop})ed. 

“ Good-b}''—I must go home.” 

“ You won’t come in ? No, no, Newcome ; believe me, I am 
no rash, careless egotist, risking wantonly the most precious 
tilings in life ! But the call is on me, and 1 must follow it. 


uomnf 


36d 


All life is God’s and all tlioiiglit—not only a fraction of it. 
He can not let me wander very far ! ” 

Blit the cold fingers lie held so warmly droj^ped from his, 
and Hewcome turned away. 

A week afterward, or thereahouts, Robert had in some sense 
followed Rewcome’s counsel. Admonished perhaps by sheer 
physical weakness, as much as by anything else, he had for 
the moment laid down his arms ; he had yielded to an invad¬ 
ing feebleness of the will, which refused, as it were, to carry 
on the struggle any longer, at such a life-destroying pitch of 
intensity. The intellectual oppression of itself brought about 
wild reaction and recoil, and a passionate appeal to that in¬ 
ward witness of the soul which holds its own long after the 
reason has practically ceased to struggle. 

It came about in this way. One morning he stood reading 
in the window of the library the last of the squire’s letters. 
It contained a short but masterly analysis of the mental habits 
and idiosyncrasies of St. Paul, apropos of St Paul’s witness to 
the Resurrection. Every now and then, as Elsmere turned 
the pages, the orthodox protest would assert itself, the ortho¬ 
dox arguments make themselves felt as though in mechanical, 
involuntary protest. But their force and vitality were gone. 
Between the Paul of Anglican theology and the fiery, fallible 
man of genius—so weak logically, so strong in poetry, in rhe¬ 
toric, in moral passion, whose portrait has been drawn for us 
by a free and temperate criticism—the rector knew, in a sort 
of dull way, that his choice was made. The one picture car¬ 
ried reason and imagination with it ; the other contented 
neither. 

But as he put down the letter something seemed to snap 
within him. Some chord of physical endurance gave way. 
For five months he had been living intellectually at a speed 
no man maintains with impunity, and this letter of the 
squire’s, with its imperious demands upon the tired, irritable 
brain, was the last straw. 

He sank down on the oriel seat, the letter dropping from 
his hands. Outside, the little garden, now a mass of red and 
pink roses, the hill and the distant stretches of park were 
wrapped in a thick, sultiy mist, through which a dim, far-off 
sunlight struggled on to the library floor, and lay in ghostly 
patches on the polished boards and lower ranges of books. 

The simplest religious thoughts began to flow over him—the 
simplest childish words of prayer were on his lii)S. He felt 
himself delivered, he knew not how or why. 

He rose deliberately, laid the squire’s letter among his other 


8GC 


nOBEUT ELSMEBE, 


papers, and tied tliem up carefully ; then he took up the hooks 
which lay piled on the squire’s writing-table : all those vol¬ 
umes of German, French, and English criticism, liberal or 
apologetic, which had been accumulating round him da}" by 
day, with a feverish, toilsome impartiality, and began rapidly 
and methodically to put them back in their places on the 
shelves. 

“ I have done too much thinking, too much reading,” he was 
saying to himself as he went through his task. “ Now let it 
be the turn of something else.” 

And still as he handled the books, it was as though Cath¬ 
erine’s figure glided backward and forward beside him, across 
the smooth fioor, as though her hand were on his arm, her eyes 
shining into his. Ah—he knew well what it was had made 
the sharpest sting of this wrestle through which he had been 
passing ! It was not merely religious dread, religious shame ; 
that terror of disloyalty to the divine images which have filled 
the soul’s inmost shrine since its first entry into consciousness, 
such as every good man feels in a like strait. This had been 
strong indeed ; but men are men, and love is love ! Ay, it was 
to the dark certainty of Catherine’s misery that every advance 
in knowledge and intellectual power had brought him nearer. 
It was from the certainty that he now, and for the last time, 
recoiled. It was too much. It could not be borne. 

He walked home, counting up the engagements of the next 
few weeks—the school-treat, two club field-days, a sermon in 
the country town, the probable opening of the new AVorkmen’s 
Institute, and so on. Oh ! to be through them all and away, 
away amid Alpine scents and silences. He stood a moment 
beside the gray, slowly moving river, half hidden beneath the 
rank flower growth, the tansy and willow-herb, the luxuriant 
elder and trailing brambles of its August banks, and thought 
with hungry passion of the clean-swept Alpine pasture, the fir- 
woods, and the tameless mountain streams. Tn three weeks 
or less he and Catherine should be climbing the Jaman or the 
Dent du Midi. And till then he would want all his time for 
men and women. Books should hold him no more. 

Catherine only put her arms round his neck in silence when 
he told her. The relief was too great for words. He, too, held 
her close, saying nothing. But that night, for the first time 
for weeks, Elsmere’s wife slept in peace and woke without 
dread of the day before her. 


IIOBEUT ELSMEllE. 


867 


BOOK 1 K— CRISIS. 

CHAPTER XXVI. 

The next fortnight was a time of truce. Elsmere neither 
read nor reasoned. He spent his days in the school, in the vil- 
lagc, pottering about the Mile End cottages, or the new insti¬ 
tute—sometimes fishing, sometimes passing long summer hours 
on the commons with his club boys, hunting the ponds for cad¬ 
dises, newts, and water-beetles, peering into the furze-bushes 
for second broods, watching the sand-martins in the gravel- 
pits, and trudging home at night in the midst of an escort of 
enthusiasts, all of them with pockets as full and miry as his 
own, to deposit the treasures of the day in the club-room. 
Once more the rector, though physically perhaps less ardent 
than of yore, was the life of the party, and a certain awe and 
strangeness which had developed in his boys’ minds toward 
him, during the last few weeks, passed away. 

It was curious that in these days he would neither sit nor 
walk alone if he could help it. Catherine or a stray parishioner 
was almost always with him. All the while, vaguely, in the 
depths of consciousness, there was the knowledge that behind 
this piece of quiet water on which his life was now sailing, 
there lay storm and darkness, and that in front loomed fresh 
possibilities of tempest. He knew, in a way, that it Avas a 
treacherous peace which had overtaken him. And yet it Avas 
peace. The pressure exerted by the will had temporarily given 
way, and the deepest forces of the man’s being had reasserted 
themselves. He could feel and love and pray again ; and 
Catherine seeing the old glow in his eyes, the old spring in 
the step, made the whole of life one thank-offering. 

On the evening following that moment of reaction in the 
Mu re well library, Robert had written to the squire. His letter 
had been practically a withdrawal from the correspondence. 

“ I find,” he wrote, “ that I have been spending too much 
time and energy lately on these critical matters. It seems to 
me that my work as a clergyman has suffered. Xor can I 
deny that your book and your letters have been to me a 
source of great trouble of mind. 

My heart is where it Avas, but my head is often confused. 
Let controversy rest awhile. My Avife says I want a holiday ; 
I think so myself, and we are off in three AA'eeks ; not, however, 
I hope, before Ave have Avelcomed you home again, and got 
you to open the new institute, which is alreadj^ dazzling 
the eyes of the village by its size and splendor, and 


3C8 


nOBERT EJLSMEUE. 


the white paint that Harris tlie builder has been lavishing 
upon it.” 

Ten days later, rather earlier than was expected, the squire 
and Mrs. Darcy were at home again. Robert re-entered the 
great house the morning after their arrival with a strange re¬ 
luctance. Its glow and magnificence, the warm, perfumed air 
of the hall, brought back a sense of old oppressions, and he 
walked down the passage to the library with a sinking heart. 
There he found the squire busy as usual with one of those 
fresh cargoes of books which always accompanied him on any 
homeward journey. He was more brown, more wrinkled, more 
shrunken ; more full of force, of harsh epigram, of grim anec¬ 
dote than ever. Robert sat on the edge of the table laughing 
over his stories of French Orientalists, or Roman cardinals, or 
modern Greek professors, enjoying the impartial sarcasm 
which one of the greatest of savants was always ready to pour 
out upon his brethren of the craft. 

The squire, however, was never genial for a moment during 
the interview. He did not mention his book nor Elsmere’s 
letter. But Elsmere suspected in him a good deal of sup¬ 
pressed irritability ; and, as after a while he abruptly ceased to 
talk, the visit grew difficult. 

The rector walked home feeling restless and depressed. The 
mind had began to work again. It was only by a great effort 
that he could turn his thoughts from the squire, and all that 
the squire had meant to him during the past year, and so woo 
back to himself “ the shy bird Peace.” 

Mr. Wendover watched the door close behind him, and then 
went back to his work with a gesture of impatience. 

Once a priest, always a priest. What a fool I was to for¬ 
get it ! You think you make an impression on the mystic, and 
at the bottom there is always something which defies you and 
common sense. ‘ Two and two do not, and shall not, make 
four,’ ” he said to himself, in a mincing voice of angry sar¬ 
casm. “‘It would give me too much pain that they should.’ 
Well, and I suppose what might have been a rational friend¬ 
ship will go by the board like everything else. What can 
make the man shilly-shally in this way ? He is convinced 
already, as he knows—those later letters were conclusive ! 
His living, perhaps, and his work ! Hot for the money’s sake ; 
there never was a more incredibly disinterested person born. 
But his work ? Well, who is to hinder his work ? Will he be the 
first parson in the Church of England who looks after the poor 
and holds his tongue ? If you can’t speak your mind, it is 
something at the rate to possess one—nine-tenths of the clergy 


nOBERT ELSMERE. 


369 


being witliout the appendage. But Elsmere—pshaw ! he will 
go muddling on to the end of the chapter ! ” 

The squire, indeed, was like a hunter whose prey escapes him 
at the very moment of capture, and there grew on him a mock¬ 
ing, aggressive mood which Elsmere often found hard to bear. 

Ono natural symptom of it was his renewed churlishness as 
to all local matters. Elsmere one afternoon spent an hour in 
trying to persuade him to open the new institute. 

“ What on earth do you want me for ? ” inquired Mr. Wend- 
over, standing before the lire in the library, the Medusa head 
peering over his shoulder. “ You know perfectly well that all 
the gentry about here—I suppose you will have some of them— 
regard me as an old reprobate, and the poor people, I imag¬ 
ine, as a kind of ogre. To me it doesn’t matter a twopenny 
damn—I apologize ; it was the Duke of Wellington’s favorite 
standard of value—but I can’t see what good it can do either 
you or the village, under the circumstances, that I should 
stand on my head for the popular edification.” 

Elsmere, however, merely stood his ground, arguing and 
bantering till the squire grudgingl^^ gave way. This time, 
after he departed, Mr. Wendover, instead of going to his work, 
still stood gloomily ruminating in front of the fire. His frown¬ 
ing eyes wandered round the great room before him. For the 
first time he was conscious that now, as soon as the charm of 
Elsmere’s presence was withdrawn, his woj-king hours w^ere 
doubly solitary ; that his loneliness weighed upon him more ; 
and that it mattered to him appreciably whether that young 
man went or stayed. The stirring of a new sensation, how¬ 
ever—unparalleled since the brief days when even Robert 
Wendover had his friends and his attractions like other men— 
w'as soon lost in renewed chafing at Elsmere’s absurdities. 
The squire had been at first perfectly content—so he told him¬ 
self—to limit the field of their intercourse, and would have 
been content to go on doing so. But Elsmere himself had in¬ 
vited freedom of speech between them. 

“I would have give him my best,” Mr. Wendover reflected, 
impatiently. “I could have handed on to him all I shall never 
use, and he might use, admirably. And now we might as 
well be on the terms we were to begin with, for all the good I 
get out of him, or he out of me. Clearly nothing but coward¬ 
ice ! ” He can not face the intellectual change, and he must, 
I suppose, dread lest it should affect his work. Good God, 
what nonsense ! As if any one inquired what an English par¬ 
son believed nowadays, so long as he 2:>erforms all the usual 
antics decently ! ” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


3'?0 

And, ineanwliile, it never occurred to the squire that Elsniere 
had a wife, and a pious one. Catherine had been dropped out 
of his calculations as to Elsmere’s future, at a very early stage. 

The following afternoon Robert, coming home from a round, 
found Catherine out, and a note awaiting him from the Hall. 

‘‘ Can you and Mrs. Elsmere come in to tea?” wrote the squire. 
‘‘ Madame de Netteville is here, and one or two others.” 

Robert grumbled a good deal, looked for Catherine to devise 
an excuse for him, could not find her, and at last reluctantly 
set out again alone. 

He was tired and his mood was heavy. As he trudged 
through the park he never once noticed the soft, sun-flooded 
distance, the shining loops of the river, the feeding deer, or 
any of those natural witcheries to wdiich eye and sense were 
generally so responsive. The laborers going home, the child¬ 
ren—with aprons full of crab-apples, and lips dyed by the first 
blackberries—who passed him, got but an absent smile or 
salute from the rector. The interval of exaltation and recoil 
was over. The ship of the mind was once more laboring in. 
alien and dreary seas. 

He roused himself to remember that he had been curious to 
see Mine, de Netteville. She was an old friend of the squire’s, 
the holder of a London salon, much more exquisite and select 
than anything Lady Charlotte could show. 

“ She had the same thing in Paris before the war,”the squire 
explained. “ Renan gave me a card to her. An extraordinary 
woman. No particular originality; but one of the best persons 
‘to consult about ideas,’ like Joubert’s Madame de Beaumont, 
I ever saw. Receptiveness itself. A beauty, too, or was one, 
and a bit of a sphinx, which adds to the attraction. Mystery 
becomes a woman vastly. One suspects her of adventures 
just enough to find her society doubly piquant.” 

Vincent directed him to the upper terrace, whither tea had 
been taken. This terrace, which was one of the features of 
Murewell, occupied the top of the yew-clothed hill on Avhich 
the library looked out. Evelyn himself had planned it. Along 
its upper side ran one of the most beautiful old walls, broken 
by niches and statues, tapestried with rose and honeysuckle, 
and opening in the center to reveal Evelyn’s darling conceit of 
all—a semicircular space, holding a fountain, and leading to a 
grotto. The grotto had been scooped out of the liill; it was 
peopled with dim figures of fauns and nymphs Avho showed 
white amid its moist greenery; and in front a marble Silence 
drooped over the fountain, which held gold and silver fish in 


nOBERT EL8MERE. 


371 


a singularly clear water. Outside ran the long stretch of level 
turf, edged with a jeweled rim of flowers ; and as tlie hill fell 
steeply underneath, the terrace was like a higli green platform 
raised into air, in order that a Wendover might see his domain, 
which from thence lay for miles spread out before him. 

Here, beside the fountain, were gathered the squire, Mrs. 
Darcy, Madame de Netteville, and two unknown men. One 
of them was introduced to Elsmere as Mr. Spooner, and recog¬ 
nized by him as a fellow of the Royal Society, a famous mathe¬ 
matician, skeptic, bon vivant, and sayer of good things. The 
other was a young Liberal Catholic, the author of a remarkable 
collection of essays on medieval subjects in which the squire, 
treating the man’s opinions of course as of no account, had in¬ 
stantly recognized the note of the true scholar. A pale, small, 
hectic creature, possessed of that restless energy of mind which 
often goes with the heightened temperature of consumption. 

Robert took a seat by Mine, de Hetteville, whose apjiearance 
was picturesqueness itself. Her dress, a skillful mixture of black 
and creamy yellow, lay about her in folds, as soft, as carelessly 
eifective as her manner. Her plumed hat shadowed a face 
which was no longer young in such a way as to hide all the 
lines possible ; while the half-light brought admirably out the 
rich, dark smoothness of the tints, the black luster of the eyes. 
A delicate blue-veined hand lay upon her knee, and Robert 
was conscious after ten minutes or so that all her movements, 
which seemed at first merely slow and languid, were in reality 
singularly full of decision and purpose. 

She was not easy to talk to on a first acquaintance. Robert 
felt that she was studying him, and was not so much at his 
ease as usual, partly owing to fatigue and mental worry. 

She asked him little abrupt questions about the neighbor¬ 
hood, his parish, his work, in a soft tone which had, however, 
a distinct aloofness, even hauteur. His answers, on the other 
liand, were often a trifle reckless and off-hand. He was in a 
mood to be impatient^with a languid inquiries into 

clerical work, and it seemed to him the squire’s description 
had been overdone. 

“ So you try to civilize your peasants,” she said at last. 
“ Does it succeed—is it Avorth while ? ” 

‘‘That depends upon your general ideas of what is Avorth 
while,” he answered, smiling. 

^ Oh, everything is Avorth Avhile that passes the time,” she 
^ said, hurriedl3^ Tlie clergy of the oX^reghne Avent through 
life half asleep. That was tlieir Avay of passing it. Your Avay, 
being a modern, is to bustle and tiy experiments.” 


372 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Her eyes, half dossed but none the less provocative, ran over 
Elsmere’s keen face and pliant frame. An atmospliere of in¬ 
tellectual and social assumption inwrapped her, which annoyed 
Robert in much the same way asLangham’s philosophical airs 
were wont to do. He was drawn without knowing it into a 
match of wits wherein his strokes, if they lacked the finish 
and subtlety of hers, showed certainly no lack of sharpness 
or mental resource. Mine, de Retteville’s tone insensibly 
changed, her manner quickened, lier great eyes gradually un¬ 
closed. 

Suddenly, as they were in the middle of a skirmish as to the 
reality of influence, Mnie. de Netteville paradoxically main¬ 
taining that no human being had ever really converted, trans¬ 
formed, or convinced another, the voice of young Wishart, 
shrill and tremulous, rose above the general level of talk. 

“ I am quite ready ; I am not the least afraid of a definition. 
Theology is organized knowledge in the field of religion, a 
science like any other science ! ” 

“ Certainly, my dear sir, certainly,” said Mr. Spooner, lean¬ 
ing forward with his hands round his knees, and speaking with 
the most elegant and good-humored sang froid imaginable, 
“ the science of the world’s ghosts ! I can not imagine any 
more fascinating.” 

“ Well,” said Mme. de Netteville to Robert, with a deep 
breath, “ that was a remark to have hurled at you all at once 
out-of-doors on a summer’s afternoon ! Oh, Mr. Spooner ! ” 
she said, raising her voice, ‘‘ don’t play the heretic here ! 
There is no fun in it; there are too many with you.” 

“ I did not begin it, my dear madame, and your reproach is 
unjust. On one side of me Archbishop Manning’s jidus 
Achates ,and the speaker took off his large straw hat and 
gracefully waved it—first to the right, then to the left. “ On 
the other, the rector of tlie parish. ‘ Cannon to right of me, 
cannon to left of me.’ I submit my courage is unimpeachable!” 

He spoke with a smiling courtesy as excessive as his silky 
mustache, his long straAV-colored beard, and his Panama hat. 
Mme. de Netteville surveyed him with cool, critical eyes. 
Robert smiled slightly, acknowledged the bow, but did not 
speak. 

Mr. Wishart evidently took no heed of anything but his own 
thoughts. He sat bolt upriglit with shining, excited eyes. 

“ Ah, I remember that article of yours in the Fortnightly! 
How you skeptics miss the point ! ” 

And out came a stream of argument and denunciation which 
had probably lain lava-hot at the heart of the young convert 


IWBEUT ELSMERE. 


for years', waiting for such a moment as this, when he liad he- 
fore him at close quarters two of the most famous antagonists 
of his faith. The outburst was striking, but certainly unpar- 
donably ill-timed. Mine, de Netteville retreated into herself 
with a shrug. Robert, in whom a sore nerve had been set jar¬ 
ring, did his utmost to begin his talk with her again. 

In vain !—for the squire struck in. He had been sitting hud¬ 
dled together—his cynical eyes wandering from Wishart to 
Elsmere—when suddenly some extravagant remark of the 
young Catholic, and Robert’s effort to edge away from the 
conversation, caught his attention at the same moment. His 
face hardened, and in his nasal voice he dealt a swift epigram 
at Mr. Wishart, which for the moment left the young dispu¬ 
tant floundering. 

But only for the moment. In another minute or two the 
argument, begun so casually, had developed into a serious 
trial of strength, in which the squire and young Wishart took 
the chief parts, while Mr. Spooner threw in a laugh and a sar¬ 
casm here and there. 

And as long as Mr. Wendover talked, Mme. de Netteville 
listened. Robert’s restless repulsion to the whole incident, his 
passionate wish to escape from these phrases and illustrations 
and turns of argument which were all so wearisome, stale and 
familiar to him, found no support in her. Mrs. Darcy dared 
not second his attempts at chat, for Mr. Wendover, on the rare 
occasions when he held forth, was accustomed to be listened 
to; and Elsmere was of too sensitive a social fiber to break 
up the party by an abrupt exit, which could only have been 
inteiqireted in one way. 

So he stayed, and perforce listened, but in complete silence. 
Hone of Mr. Wendover’s side-hits touched him. Only as the 
talk went on, the rector in the background got paler and paler; 
his eyes, as they passed from the mobile face of the Catholic 
convert, already, for those who knew, marked with the signs 
of death, to the bronzed visage of the squire, grew duller— 
more instinct with a slowly dawning despair. 

Half an hour later he was once more on the road leading to 
the park gate. He had a vague memory that at parting the 
squire had shown him the cordiality of one suddenly anxious 
to apologize by manner, if not by woixl. Otherwise every¬ 
thing was forgotten. He was only anxious, half dazed as he 
was, to make out wherein lay the vital difference between his 
present self and the Elsmere who had passed along that road 
an hour before. 


374 


nonmiT elsmere. 


He had heard a conversation on religious topics, wherein 
nothing was new to him, nothing affected him intellectually at 
all. What was there in that to break the spring of life like 
this ? He stood still, heavily trying to understand himself. 

Then gradually it became clear to him. A month ago, 
every word of that hectic young pleader for Christ and the 
Christian certainties would have roused in him a leaping, 
passionate sympathy—the heart’s yearning assent, even when 
the intellect was most perplexed. Now that inmost strand 
had given away. Suddenly the disintegrating force he had 
been so pitifully, so blindly, holding at bay had penetrated 
once for all into the sanctuary ! What had happened to him 
had been the first real failure of feeling^ the first treachery of 
the heart. Wishart’s hopes and hatreds, and sublime defiances 
of man’s petty faculties, had aroused to him no echo, no 
response. His soul had been dead within him. 

As he gained the shelter of the wooded lane beyond the 
gate it seemed to Robert that he was going through, once 
more, that old fierce temptation of Runyan’s: 

‘‘ For after the Lord had in this manner thus graciously 
delivered me, and had set me down so sweetly in the faith of 
His Holy Gospel, and had given me such strong consolation 
and blessed evidence from heaven, touching my interest in 
His love through Christ, the tempter came upon me again, and 
that with a more grievous and dreadful temptation than . 
before. And that was : ‘ To sell and part wdth this most 
blessed Christ; to exchange Him for the things of life, for 
anything ! ’ The temptation lay upon me for the space of a 
year, and did follow me so continually that I was not rid of it 
one day in a month : no, not sometimes one hour in many 
days together, for it did always, in almost whatever I thought, 
intermix itself therewith, in such sort that I could neither eat 
m}^ food, stoop for a pin, chop a stick, or cast mine eyes to look 
on this or that, but still the temptation would come : ‘ Sell 
Christ for this, or sell Christ for that ; sell Him, sell Him ! ” 

Was this what lay before the minister of God now in this 
salva osciira of life ? The selling of the Master, of ‘‘ the love 
so sweet, the unction spiritual,” for an intellectual satisfaction, 
the ravaging of all the fair places of the heart by an intellec¬ 
tual need! 

And still through all the despair, all the revolt, all the pain, 
which made the summer air a darkness,-and closed every sense 
in him to the evening beauty he felt the irresistible march and 
pressure of the new instincts, the new forces, wdiich life and 
thought had been calling into being. The words of St. 



BOBEllT ELSMERE. 


375 


Augustine which he had read to Catherine, taken in a strange 
new sense, came back to him : “ Commend to the keeping of 
the Triitli whatever the Truth hath given thee, and thou shalt 
lose nothing ! ” 

Was it the summons of Truth which was rending the Avhole 
nature in this way ? 

Robert stood still, and with his hands locked behind him, 
and his face turned like the face of a blind man toward a 
world of which it saw nothing, went through a desperate 
catechism of himself. 

‘‘ I believe in God? Surely, surely ! ‘Though he slay 
me yet Avill I trust in him ! ’ Do I believe in Christ f Yes—in 
the teacher, the martyr, the s^^mbol to us Westerns of all 
things heavenly and abiding, the image and pledge of the 
invisible life of the spirit—with all my soul and all my mind ! 

But in the Man-God,\hQi Word from Eternity—in a 
Avonder-working Christ, in a risen and ascended Jesus, in the 
living Intercessor and Mediator for the lives of his doomed 
brethren ? ” 

lie Avaited, conscious that it Avas the crisis of his history, 
and there rose in him, as though articulated one by one by an 
audible A^oice, words of irrevocable meaning : 

“ Every human soul in Avhich the voice of God makes itself 
felt enjoys, equally with Jesus of Nazareth, the divine wor¬ 
ship, and ‘ miracles do not happen!'' ” 

It Avas done. He felt for the moment as Bunyan did after 
his lesser defeat. 

“Now was the battle Avon, and down fell I as a bird that is 
shot from the top of a tree into great guilt and fearful des¬ 
pair. Thus getting out of my bed I Avent moping in the field; 
but God knoAvs with as heavy a heart as mortal man I think 
could bear, where for the space of two hours I was like a man 
bereft of life.” 

All these years of happy, spiritual certainty, of rejoicing 
oneness with Christ, to end in this wreck and loss ! Was not 
this indeed “ il gran rifiiito ”—the greatest of which human 
daring is capable ? The lane darkened round him. Not a soul 
Avas in sight. The only sounds Avere the sounds of a gently 
breathing nature, sounds of birds and SAvaying branches and 
intermittent gusts of air rustling through the gorse and the 
drifts of last year’s leaves in tlie Avood beside him. He moved 
mechanically onward, and presently, after the first flutter of 
desolate terror had passed aAvay, with a new inrushing sense 
which seemed to him a sense of liberty—of infinite expansion. 

Suddenly the trees before him thinned, the ground sloped 


376 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


away, and there to tlie left on the westernmost edge of the hill 
lay the square stone rectory, its windows open to the evening 
coolness, a white flutter of pigeons round the dove-cote on the 
side lawn, the gold of the August wheat in tlie great corn-field 
showing against the heavy girdle of oak-wood. 

Robert stood gazing at it—the home consecrated by love, 
by effort, by faith. The high alternations of intellectual and 
s})iritual debate, the strange emerging sense of deliverance, 
gave way to a most bitter human pang of misery. 

“ Oh, God! My wife—my work! ” 

—There was a sound of a voice calling—Catherine’s voice 
calling for him. He leaned against the gate of the wood-path, 
struggling sternly with himself. This was no simple matter 
of his own intellectual consistency or happiness. Another’s 
Avhole life was concerned. Any precipitate speech, or hasty 
action, would be a crime. A man is bound above all things to 
protect those who depend on him from his own immature or 
revocable impulses. Not a word yet, till this sense of convul¬ 
sion and upheaval had passed away, and the mind was once 
more its own master. 

He opened the gate and went toward her. She was strolling 
along the path looking out for him, one delicate hand gather¬ 
ing up the long evening dress—that very same black brocade 
she had worn in the old days at Burwood—the other playing 
with their Dandie Hinmont puppy who was leaping beside 
her. As she caught sight of him, there was the flashing smile, 
the hurrying step. And he felt he could but just drag him¬ 
self to meet her. 

•‘Robert, how long you have been ! I thought you must 
have stayed to dinner after all ! And how tired you seem ! ” 

“ I had a long walk,” he said, catching her hand, as it 
slipped itself under his arm, and clinging to it as though to a 
support. “ And I am tired. There is no use whatever in 
denjdng it.” 

His voice was light, but if it had not been so dark she must 
liave been startled by his face. As they went on tow# d the 
house, hov/ever, she scolding him for overwalking, he won his 
battle with himself. He went through the evening so that 
even Catherine’s jealous eyes saw nothing but extra fatigue. 
I i the most desperate straits of life love is still the fountain 
((f all endurance, and if ever a man loved it was Robert 
Elsmere. 

But that night, as he lay sleepless in their quiet room, with. 
the window open to the stars and the rising gusts of wdnd, 
which blew the petals of the cluster-rose outside in drifts of 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


S77 


“ fair weatlier snow ” on to the window-sill, he went through 
an agony which no words can adequately describe. 

He must, of course, give up his living and his Orders. His 
standards and judgments had always been simple and plain in 
these respects. In other men it might be right and possible 
that they should live on in the ministry of the Church, doing 
the humane and charitable work of the Church, while refusing 
assent to the intellectual and dogmatic framework on which 
the Church system rests ; but for himself it would be neither 
right nor wrong, but simply impossible. He did not argue or 
reason about it. There was a favorite axiom of Mr. Grey’s 
which had become part of his pupil’s spiritual endowment, and 
which was perpetually present to him at this crisis of his life, in 
the spirit, if not in the letter—“ Conviction is the Conscience of 
the MindP And with this intellectual conscience he was no 
more capable of trifling than with the moral conscience. 

The night passed away. How the rare intermittent sounds 
impressed themselves upon him !—the stir of the child’s waking 
soon after midnight in the room overhead ; the cry of the owls 
on the oak-wood ; the purring of the night-jars on the com¬ 
mon ; the morning chatter of the swallows round the eaves. 

With the first invasion of the dawn Robert raised himself 
and looked at Catherine. She was sleeping with that light, 
sound sleep which belongs to health of body and mind, one 
hand under her face, the other stretched out in soft relaxation 
beside her. Her husband hung over her in a bewilderment of 
feeling. Before him passed all sorts of incoherent pictures of 
the future; the mind was caught by all manner of incongruous 
details in that saddest uprooting which lay before him. How 
her sleep, her ignorance, reproached him ! He thought of the 
wreck of all her pure ambitions—for him, for their common 
work, for the people she had come to love ; the ruin of her life 
of charity and tender usefulness, the darkening of all her hopes, 
the shaking of all her trust. Two years of devotion, of ex¬ 
quisite self-surrender, had brought her to this ! It was for 
this he had lured her from the shelter of her hills, for this she 
had opened to Iiim all her sweet stores of faitli, all the deepest 
springs of her womanhood. Oh, how she must suffer ! The 
thought of it and his own helplessness wrung his heart. 

Oil, could he keep her love through it all! There was an 
unspeakable dread mingled with his grief—his remorse. It 
had been there for months. In her eyes would not only pain 
but sin divide them ? Could he possibly prevent her whole 
relation to him from altering and dwindling ? 

It was to be the problem of his. remaining life. With a great 


3'78 


nOBERT EL&UBRB^. 


cry of the soul to that God it yearned and felt for through all 
the darkness and ruin which encompassed it, he laid his hand 
on hers with the timidest passing touch. 

“ Catherine, I will make amends ! My wife, I will make 
amends ! ” 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

The next morning Catherine, finding that Robert still slept 
on after their usual waking time, and remembering his ex- 
liaustion of the night before, left him softl}^ and kept the 
house quiet that he might not be disturbed. She was in charge 
of the now toddling Mary in .the dining-room when the door 
opened and Robert appeared. 

At sight of him she sprang up with a half cry ; the face 
seemed to have lost all its fresh color, its look of sun and air ; 
the eyes were sunk ; his lips and chin lined and drawn. It 
was like a face from which the jmuth had suddenly been 
struck out. 

“ Robert !— ” but her question died on her lips. 

“ A bad night, darling, and a bad headache,” he said, grop¬ 
ing his way, as it seemed to her, to the table, his hand leaning 
on her arm. “ Give me some breakfast.” 

She restrained herself at once, put him into an arm-chair by 
the window, and cared for him in her tender, noiseless way. 
But she had grown almost as pale as he, and her heart was 
like lead. 

“ Will you send me off for the day to Thurston ponds ? ” he 
said presently, trying to smile with lips so stiff and nerveless 
that the will had small control over them. 

“Can you walk so far? You did overdo it yesterda}^ you 
know. You have never got over Mile End, Robert.” 

But her voice had a note in it which in his weakness he 
could hardly bear. He thirsted to be alone again, to be able to 
think over quietly what was best for her—for them both. 
There must be a next step, and in her neighborhood he was 
too feeble, too tortured, to decide upon it. 

“No more, dear—no more,” he said impatiently, as she 
tried to feed him ; then he added, as he rose : “ Don’t make 
arrangements for our going next week, Catherine ; it can’t be 
so soon.” 

Catherine looked at him with eyes of utter dismay. The 
sustaining hope of all these difficult weeks, which had" slipped 
with such terrible unexpectedness into their happy life, was 
swept away from her. 

“ Robert, you ought to go.” 


noBEllT ELSMERE. 


^19 


*‘I have too many tilings to arrange,” he said sharply, 
almost irritably. Then his tone changed : ‘‘ Don’t urge it, 
Catherine.” 

Ilis eyes in their weariness seemed to entreat her not to 
argue. She stooped and kissed him, her lips trembling. 

“ When do you want to go to Thurston ? ” 

“ As soon as possible. Can you find me my fishing-basket 
and get me some sandwiches ? I shall only lounge there and 
take it easy.” 

She did everything for him that wifely hands could do. 
Then when his fishing-basket was strapped on, and his lunch 
was slipped into the capacious pocket of the well-worn shoot¬ 
ing coat, she threw her arms around him. 

‘‘ Robert, you will come away soon.” 

He roused himself and kissed her. 

“ I will,” he said simply, withdrawing, however, from her 
grasp, as though he could not bear those close, pleading eyes, 
“ Good-by ! I shall be back some time in the afternoon.” 

From her post beside the study window she watched him 
take the short-cut across the corn-field. She was miserable, 
and all at sea. A week ago he had been so like himself again, 
and now— Never had she seen him in anything like this 
state of physical and mental collapse. 

‘‘ Oh, Robert,” she cried under her breath, with an abandon¬ 
ment like a child’s, strong soul that she was, “ why vjon'’t you 
tell me, dear ? Why won’t you let me share ? I might help 
you through—I might.” 

She supposed he must be again in trouble of mind. A 
weaker woman would have implored, tormented, till she knew 
all. Catherine’s very strength and delicacy of nature, and 
that respect which was inbred in her for the sacra of the 
inner life, stood in her way. She could not catechise him, 
and force his confidence on this subject of all others. It 
must be given freely. And oh ! it was so long in coming ! 

Surely, surely it must be mainly physical, the result of over¬ 
strain-expressing itself in characteristic mental worry, just as 
daily life reproduces itself in dreams. Tlie worldly man suffers 
at such times through worldly things, the religious man through 
his religion. Comforting herself a little with thoughts of this 
kind, and with certain more or less vague preparations for de¬ 
parture, Catherine got through the morning as best she miglit. 

Meanwhile, Robert was trudging along to Thurston under 
a sky whicli, after a few threatening showers, promised once 
more to be a sky of intense heat. He had with him all the 
tackle necessary for spooning pike, a sport tlie novelty and sue- 


380 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


cess of which had liiigely commended it the year before to those 
Esau-like instincts Murewell had so much developed in him. 

And now—oh, the weariness of the August warmth, and the 
long stretches of sandy road! By the time he reached the ponds 
lie was tired out; but instead of stopping at the largest of the 
three, where a picturesque group of old brick cottages brought 
a reminder of man and his works into the prairie solitude of 
the common, he pushed on to a smaller pool just beyond, now 
hidden iira green cloud of birch-wood. Here, after pushing 
his way through the closely set trees, he made some futile at¬ 
tempts at fishing, only to put up his rod long before the morn¬ 
ing was over and lay it beside him on the bank. And there he 
sat for hours, vaguely watching the reflection of the clouds, 
the gambols and quarrels of the water-fowl, the v^ays of the 
birds, the alternations of sun and shadow on the softly moving 
trees—the real self of him passing all the while through an 
interminable inward drama, starting from the past, stretching 
to the future, steeped in passion, in pity, in regret. 

He thought of the feelings with which he had taken Orders, 
of Oxford scenes and Oxford persons, of the efforts, the pains, 
the successes of his first year at Murewell. AYhat a ghastly 
mistake it had all been ! He felt a kind of sore contempt for 
himself, for his own lack of prescience, of self-knowledge. 
His life looked to him so shallow and worthless. How does a 
man ever retrieve such a false step ? He groaned aloud as he 
thought of Catherine linked to one born to defeat her hopes, 
and all that natural pride that a woman feels in the strength 
and consistency of the man she loves. As he sat there by the 
water he touched the depth of self-humiliation. 

As to religious belief, everything was a chaos. What might 
be to him the ultimate forms and condition of thought, the 
tired mind was quite incapable of divining. To every stage 
in the process of destruction it was feverislily alive. But its 
formative energy was for the moment gone. The foundations 
were swept away, and everything must be built up afresh. 
Only the habit of faith held, the close instinctive clinging to 
a Power beyond sense—a Goodness, a Will, not man’s. The 
soul had been stripped of its old defenses, but at his worst 
there was never a moment when Elsmere felt himself utterly 
forsaken. 

But his people—his work ! Every now and then into the 
fragmentary debate still going on within him there would flash 
little pictures of Murewell. The green, with the sun on the 
house-fronts, the awning over the village shop, the vane on the 
old “ Manor House,” the familiar figures at the doors ; his 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


381 


clmrcli, with every figure in the Sunday congregation as clear 
to him as though he were that moment in tlie ])ulpit ; the 
children he had taught, the sick he had nursed, this or that 
weather-beaten or brutalized peasant wdiose history he knew, 
whose tragic secrets he had learned—all these memories and 
images clung about him as though wdth ghostly hands, asking: 
“ Why will you desert us ? You are ours—stay with us ! ” 

Then his thoughts would run over the future, dwelling, with 
a tense realistic sharpness, on every detail which lay before 
liim—the arrangements with his locmn tene^is^ihe interview 
with the bishop, the parting with the rectory. It even oc¬ 
curred to him to wonder what must be done with Martha and 
his mother’s cottage. 

His mother ? As he thought of her a wave of unutterable 
longing rose and broke. The difficult tears stood in his eyes. 
He had a strange conviction that at this crisis of his life she 
of all human beings would have understood him best. 

When would the squire know ? He pictured the interview 
with him, divining, with the same abnormal clearness of inward 
vision, Mr. Wendover’s start of mingled triumph and impa¬ 
tience—triumph in the new recruit, impatience with the 
quixotic folly which could lead a man to look upon orthodox 
dogma as a thing real enough to be publicly renounced, or 
clerical pledges as more than a form of words. So henceforth 
he was on the same side with the squire, held by an indiscrimi- 
nating world as bound to the same negations, the same hostili¬ 
ties. The thought roused in him a sudden fierceness of moral 
repugnance. The squire and Edward Langham—they were 
the only skeptics of whom he had ever had close and personal 
experience. And with all his old affection for Langham, all 
his frank sense of pliancy in the squire’s hands, yet in this 
strait of life how he shrinks from them both !—souls at war 
with life and man, without holiness, without perfume ! 

It is the law of things ? ‘‘ Once loosen a man’s religio, once 
fling away the old binding elements, the old traditional re¬ 
straints which have made him Avhat he is, and moral deterior¬ 
ation is certain.” How often he has heard it said ! How 
often he has indorsed it ! Is it true ! His heart grows cold 
within him. What good man can ever contemplate with pa¬ 
tience the loss, not of friends or happiness, but of his best self? 
What shall it profit a man, indeed, if he gain the whole world— 
the whole world of knowledge and speculation—and lose his 
own soul? 

And then, for his endless comfort, there rose on the inward 
eye the vision of an Oxford lecture-room, of a short, sturdy fig- 


382 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Tire, of a great brow over lionest eyes, of words alive witli 
inoi’al passion, of tliouglit instinct with the beauty of holiness. 
Thank God for the saint in Henry Grey ! Thinking of it, 
Robert felt his own self-respect re-born. 

Oh ! to see Grey in the flesh, to get his advice, his approval! 
Even though it was the depth of vacation. Grey was so closely 
connected with the town, as distinguished from the university 
life of Oxfoi-d, it might be quite possible to find him at home. 
Elsmere suddenly determined to find out at once if he could 
be seen. 

And if so, he would go over to Oxfoi*d at once. This should 
bo the next step, and he would say nothing to Catherine till 
afterwards. He felt himself so dull, so weary, so resourceless. 
Grey should help and counsel him, should send him back with 
a clearer brain—a quicker ingenuity of love, better furnished 
against her pain and his own. 

Then everything else was forgotten; and he thought of noth¬ 
ing but that grisly moment of waking in the empt}’- room, 
when still believing it night, he had put out his hand for his 
wife, and with a superstitious pang had felt himself alone. 
Ills heart torn with a hundred inarticulate cries of memory 
and grief, he sat an beside the water, unconscious of the pass¬ 
ing of time, his gray eyes staring sightlessly at the wood- 
])igeons as they flew past him, at the occasional flash of a 
king-flshei’, as the moving panorama of summer clouds above 
the trees opposite. • 

At last he was startled back to consciousness by the fall of a 
few heavy drops of warm rain. He looked at his watch. It 
was nearly four o’clock. He I'ose, stilf and ci-amped with 
sitting, and at the same instant he saw beyond the birch-wood 
on the 0})en stretch of common a boy’s figure, which, after a 
step or two, he recognized as Ned Irwin. 

“You here, Ned? ” he said, stopping, the pastoral temper in 
him i-easserting itself at once. “ Why aren’t you harvesting ? ” 

“ Please, sir, I finished with the Hall medders yesterday, and 
Mr. Carter’s job don’t begin till to-morrow. He’s got a 
machine coming from Witley, he hev, and they won’t let him 
have it till Thursday, so I’ve been out after things for the 
club.” 

And opening the tin box strapped on his back, he showed the 
day’s capture of butterflies, and some belated birds’ eggs, the 
plunder of a bit of common where the turf for the winter’s 
burning was just being cut. 

“ Goat-sucker, linnet, stone-chat,” said the rectoi*, fingering 
them. “ Well done for August, Ned, If you haven’t got any- 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


383 


thing better to do with them give them to that small boy of 
Mr. Carter’s that’s been ill so long. He’d thank you for them, 
I know.” 

The lad nodded with a guttural sound of assent. Then his 
new-born scientific ardor seemed to struggle with his rustic 
costiveness of speech. 

“ I’ve been just watching a queer creetur,” he said at last, 
hurriedl}" ; ‘‘ I b’leeve he’s that un.” 

And he pulled out a well-thumbed hand-book, and pointed 
to a cut of the grasshopper warbler. 

“ Whereabouts ? ” asked Robert, wondering the while at his 
own start of interest. 

“ In that bit of common t’other side the big pond,” said 
Ked, pointing, his brick-red countenance kindling into sup¬ 
pressed excitement. 

“ Come and show me ! ” said the rector, and the two went 
off together. And sure enough, after a little beating about, 
they heard the note which had roused the lad’s curiosity, the 
loud whirr of a creature that should have been a grasshopper, 
and was not. 

They stalked the bird a few yards, stooping and crouching, 
Robert’s eager hand on the boy’s arm, whenever the clumsy 
rustic movements made too much noise among the under¬ 
wood. They watched it uttering its jarring imitative note on 
bush after bush, just dropping to the ground as they came 
near, and flitting a yard or two further, but otherwise showing 
no sign of alarm at their presence. Then suddenly the im¬ 
pulse which had been leading him on died in the rector. He 
stood upright, with a long sigh. 

I must go Chome, Ned,” he said abruptly. ‘‘ Where are 
you off to ? ” 

Please, sir, there’s my sister at the cottage, her as married 
Jim, the under-keeper. I be going there for my tea.” 

“ Come along, then ; we can go together.” 

They trudged along in silence ; presently Robert turned on 
his companion. 

“ Ned, this natural history has been a fine thing for you, 
my lad ; mind you stick to it. That and good work will 
make a man of you. When I go away—” 

The boy started and stopped dead, his dumb animal eyes 
fixed on his companion. 

“ You know I shall soon be going off on my holiday,” said 
Robert, smiling faintly ; adding, hurriedly, as the boy’s face 
resumed its ordinary expression : ‘‘ But some day, Ned, I shall 
go for good. I don’t know whether you’ve been depending 


384 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


on me—you and some of the others. I think perhaps you 
have. If so, don’t depend on me, Ned, any more ! It must 
all come to an end—everything must —everything !—except 
the struggle to be a man in the world, and not a beast—to 
make one’s heart clean and soft, and not hard and vile. That 
is the one thing that matters, and lasts. Ah, never forget 
that, Ned. Never forget it ! ” 

He stood still, towering over the slouching, thickset form 
beside him, his pale intensity of look giving a rare dignity 
and beauty to the face which owed so little of Its attractive¬ 
ness to comeliness of feature. He had the makings of a true 
shepherd of men, and his mind as he spoke was crossed by a 
hundred dilferent currents of feelings—bitterness, pain, and 
yeai-ning unspeakable. No man could feel the wrench that 
lay before him more than he. 

Ned Irwin said not a word. His heavy lids were drooped 
over his deep-set eyes ; he stood motionless, nervously fiddling 
with his butterfly net—awkwardness, and, as it seemed, irre¬ 
sponsiveness, in his whole attitude. 

Robert gathered himself together. 

“ Well, good night, my lad,” he said, with a’change of tone. 
“ Good luck to you ; be off to your tea ! ” 

And he turned away, striding swiftly over the short, burned 
August grass in the direction of the Murewell Woods, Avhich 
rose in a blue haze of heat against the slumberous afternoon 
sky. He had not gone a hundred yards before he heard a 
clattering after him. He stopped, and Ned came iip with him. 

They’re heavy, them things,” said the boy, desperately 
blurting it out, and pointing, with heaving chest and panting 
breath, to the rod and basket. “ I am going that way ; I can 
leave un at the rectory.” 

Robert’s eyes gleamed. 

“ They are no weight, Ned—’cause why? I’ve been lazy 
and caught not fish ! But there ” after a moment’s hesitation 
he slipped off the basket and rod, and put them into the be¬ 
grimed hands held out for them. “ Bring them when you 
like ; I don’t know wdien I shall want them again. Thank 
you, and God bless you ! ” 

The boy was off with his booty in a second. 

“ Perhaps he’ll like to think he did it for me, by and by,” 
said Robert sadly to himself, moving on, a little moisture in 
the clear gray eye. 

About three o’clock next day Robert was in Oxford. The 
night before he had telegraphed to asked if Grey was at home. 


nOBERT ELSMERE. 


385 


The reply had been ; “Here for a week on way north ; come 
by all means.” Oh ! that look of Catherine’s when he had told 
her of his plan, trying in vain to make it look merely casual 
and ordinary. 

“ It is more than a year since I have set eyes on Grey, Cath¬ 
erine. And the day’s change would be a boon. I could stay 
the night at Merton, and get home early next day.” 

But as he turned a pleading look to her he had been startled 
by the sudden rigidity of face and form. Her silence had in it 
an intense, almost a haughty reproach, which she was too 
keenly hurt to put into words. 

He caught her by the arm, and drew her forcibly to him. 
Til ere he made her look into the eyes which were full of noth¬ 
ing but the most passionate, imploring affection. 

“ Have patience a little more, Catherine ! ” he gently mur¬ 
mured. “ Oh, how I have blessed jmu for silence ! Only till 
I come back ! ” 

“ Till you come back,” she repeated slowly. “ I can not 
bear it any longer, Robert, that you should give others your 
confidence, and not me.” 

He groaned and let her go. No—there should be but one 
day more of silence, and that day was interposed for her sake. 
If Grey from his calmer standpoint bade him Avait and test him¬ 
self, before taking any irrevocable step, he Avould obey him. 
And if so, the worst pang of all need not yet be inflicted on 
Catherine, though as to his state of mind he would be perfectly 
open with her. 

A few hours later his cab deposited him at the well-known 
door. It seemed to him that he and the scorched plane-trees 
lining the sides of the road were the only living thing in the 
Avide, sun-beaten street. 

Every house was shut up. Only the Grej^’s open Avindows. 
amid their shuttered neighbors, had a friendly human air. 

Yes ; Mr. Grey was in, and expecting Mr. Elsmere. Rob¬ 
ert climbed the dim, familiar staircase, his heart beating fast. 

“ Elsmere, this is a piece of good fortune ! ” 

And the two men, after a grasp of the hand, stood fronting 
each other : Mr. Grey, a light of pleasure on the rugged, dark- 
complexioned face, looking up at his taller and paler visitor. 

But Robert could find nothing to say in return ; and in an 
instant Mr. Grey’s quick eye detected the strained, nervous 
emotion of the man before him. 

“ Come and sit down, Elsmere—there, in the window, Avhere 
Ave can talk. One has to live on this east side of the house 
this weather. In the first place,” said Mr. Grey, scrutinizing 


386 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


him as he returned to his own book-littered corner of the win¬ 
dow-seat—“ in the first place, my dear fellov^, I can’t congratu¬ 
late you on your appearance. I never saw a man look in worse 
condition—to be up and about.” 

“ That’s nothing ! ” said Robert, almost impatiently, I 
want a holiday, I believe. Grey ! ” and he looked nervously. 
out over garden and apple-trees, “ I have come—very selfishly 
—to ask your advice, to throw a trouble upon you, to clain all 
your friendship can give me.” 

He stopped. Mr. Grey was silent—his expression changing 
instantly, the bright eyes profoundly, anxiously attentive. 

I have just come to the conclusion,” said Robert, after a 
moment, with abruptness, “ that I ought now—at this mo¬ 
ment,—to leave the Church, and give up my living, for reasons 
which I will describe to you. But before I act on the conclu¬ 
sion I wanted the liglit of your mind upon it, seeing that— 
that—other persons than myself are concerned.” 

“ Give up your living ! ” echoed Mr. Grey, in a low voice of 
astonishment. He sat looking at the face and figure of the man 
before him with a half-frowning expression. How often Rob¬ 
ert had seen some rash exuberant youth quelled by that momen¬ 
tary frown ! Essentially conservative as was the inmost nature 
of man, for all his radicalism there were few things for which 
Henry Grey felt more instinctive distaste than for unsteadiness 
of will and purpose, however glorified by fine names. Robert 
knew it, and, strangely enough, felt for a moment in the pres¬ 
ence of the heretical tutor as a culprit before a judge. 

“ It is, of course, a matter of opinions,” he said, with an 
etfort. “Do you remember, before I took Orders, asking 
whether I had ever had difficulties, and I told you that I had 
probably never gone deep enough. It was profoundly true, 
though I didn’t really mean it. But this year—No, no, I have 
not been merely vain and hasty ! I may be a shallow creature, 
but it has been natural growth, not wantonness.” 

And at last his eyes met Mr. Grey’s firmly, almost with 
solemnity. It Avas as if in the last feAv moments he had been 
instinctively testing the quality of his own conduct and mo¬ 
tives by the touchstone of the rare personality beside him ; 
and they had stood the trial. There was such pain, such sin¬ 
cerity, above all such freedom from littleness of soul implied in 
words and looks that Mr. Grey quickly held out his hand. 
Robert grasped it, and felt that the Avay was clear before him. 

“ Will you give me an account of it ? ” said Mr. Grey, and 
his tone was grave sympathy itself. “ Or Avould you rather 
confine yourself to generalities and accomplished facts ? ” 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


387 


“ I will tiy and give you an account of it,” said Robert; and 
sitting there with his elbows on his knees, his gaze fixed on 
the yellowing afternoon sky, and the intricacies of the garden 
walls between them and the new museum, he went through 
the history of the last two years. He described the beginnings 
of his historical work, the gradual enlargement of the mind’s 
‘ horizons, and the intrusion within them of question after 
question, and subject after subject. Then he mentioned the 
squire’s name. 

“ Ah ! ” exclaimed Mr. Grey, “ I had forgotten you were 
that man’s neighbor. I Avonder he didn’t set you against the 
Avhole business, inhuman old cynic ! ” 

He spoke with the strong dislike of the idealist, devoted in 
practice to an every-day ministry to human need, for the in¬ 
tellectual egotist. Robert caught and relished tlie old pugna¬ 
cious flash in the eye, the Midland strength of'accent. 

“ Cjuiic he is, not altogether inhuman, I think. I fought 
him about his drains and his cottages, however ”—and he 
smiled sadly—‘‘before I began to read his books. But the 
man’s genius is incontestable, his learning enormous. He 
found me in a susceptible state, and I recognize that his influ¬ 
ence immensely accelerated a process already begun.” 

]\Ir. Gi’ey Avas struck Avith the simplicity and fullness of the 
avoAval. A lesser man Avould hardly have made it in the same 
Avay. Rising to pace up and doAvn the room—the familiar 
action recalling vividly to Robert the Sunda}" afternoons of 
by-gone years—he began to put questions Avith a clearness and 
decision that made them so many guides to the man answer¬ 
ing, through the tangle of his own recollections. 

"“I see,” said the tutor, at last, his hands in the pockets of 
his short gray coat, his brow bent and thoughtful. “ "Well, 
the process in you lias been the typical process of the present 
day. Abstract thought has had little or nothing to say to it. 
It has been all a question of literary and historical evidence. 
I am old-fashioned enough”—and he smiled—“to stick to the 
a priori impossibility of miracles, but then I am a philosopher ! 
You have come to see how miracle is manufactured, to recog¬ 
nize in it merely a natural, inevitable outgroAvth of human 
testimony, in its pre-scientiflc stages. It has been all experi¬ 
mental, inductive. I imagine”—he looked up—“you didn’t 
get much helj) out of the orthodox apologists ? ” 

Robert slirugged his shoulders. 

“ It often seemed to me,” he said drearily, “ I might have 
got through, but for the men Avhose books 1 used to read and 
respect most in old days. The point of view is generally so 


388 


ROBERT ELSMERE, 


extraordinarily limited. Westcott, for instance, wlio means so 
much nowadays to the English religious world, first isolates 
Christianity from all the other religious phenomena of the 
Avorld, and then argues upon its details. You might as well 
isolate English jurisprudence, and discuss its details without 
any reference to Teutonic custom or Roman law ! You may 
he as logical or as learned as you like within the limits chosen, 
but the whole result is false ! You treat Christian witness and 
Biblical literature as you would treat no other witness and no 
other literature in the world. And you can not show cause 
enough. For your reasons depend on the very witness under 
dispute. And so you go on arguing in a circle, ad infinitum^ 

But his voice dropped. The momentary eagerness died 
away as quickly as it had risen, leaving nothing but depression 
behind it. 

Mr. Gre}" meditated. At last he said, with a delicate change 
of tone : 

‘‘ And now—if I may ask it, Elsmere—how far has this 
destructive process gone ? ” 

“J can’t tell you,” said Robert, turning away almost Avith a 
groan ; “I only know that the things I loA^ed once I love still, 
and that—that—if I had the heart to think at all I should see 
more of God in the world than I ever saw before.” 

The tutor’s eye flashed. Robert had gone back to the win¬ 
dow, and was miserably looking out. After all, he had told 
only half his story. 

“ And so you feel you must gi\m up your living?” 

“ What else is there for me to do ? ” cried Robert, turning 
upon him, startled by the slow, deliberate tone. 

“ Well, of course, you knoAV that there are many men, men 
Avith Avhom both you and I are acquainted, Avhohold very much 
Avhat I imagine your opinions now are, or Avill settle into, who 
are still in the Church of England,doing admirable work there!” 

“ I knoAv,” said Elsmere quickly—“ I knoAv ; I can not con¬ 
ceive it, nor could you. Imagine standing up Sunday after 
Sunday to say the things you do not believe—using Avords as a 
convention which those who hear you receive as literal truth 
—and trusting the maintenance of your position either to your 
neighbor’s forbearance or to your oAvn powers of evasion ! 
AVith the ideas at present in my head, nothing Avould induce 
me to preach another Easter-day seianon to a congregation 
that have both a moral and a legal right to demand from me an 
implicit belief in the material miracle ! ” 

Yes,” said the other gravely—“ yes, I belieA^e jmu are 
right. It can’t be said the Broad Church movment has helped 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


389 


ns much ! How greatly it promised !—how little it has per¬ 
formed ! For the private person, the worshiper, it is differ¬ 
ent—or I think so. No man pries into our prayers; and to cut 
ourselves off from common worship is to lose that fellowship 
which is in itself a witness and vehicle of God.” 

But his tone had grown hesitating and touched with melan¬ 
choly. 

There was a moment’s silence. Then Robert walked up to 
him again. 

“ At the same time,” he said falteringly, standing before the 
elder man, as he might have stood as an undergraduate, “let 
me not be rash ! If you think this change has been too rapid 
to last—if you, knowing me better than at this moment I can 
know myself—if you bid me wait a while, before I take any 
overt step, I will wait^—oh, God knows I will wait !—my 
wife—” and his husky voice failed him utterly. 

“ Your wife! ” cried Mr. Gray, startled. “ Mrs. Elsmere does 
not know ? ” 

“ My wife knows nothing, or almost nothing—and it will 
break her heart.” 

lie moved hastily away again, and stood with his back to 
his friend, his tall, narrow form outlined against the window. 
Mr. Grey was left in dismay, rapidly turning over the impres¬ 
sions of Catherine left on him by his last year’s sight of her. 
That pale, distinguished woman with her look of strength and 
character—he remembered Langham’s anabasis of her, and of 
the silent religious intensity she had brought with her from 
her training among the northern hills. 

Was there a bitteily human tragedy preparing under all 
this thought-drama he had been listening to ? 

Deeply moved, he went up to Robert, and laid his rugged 
hand almost timidly upon him. 

“Elsmere, it won’t break her heart ! You are a good man. 
She is a good woman.” What an infinity of meaning there 
was in the simple woi’ds ! “ Take courage. Tell her at once— 

tell her everything—and let her decide whether there shall 
be any waiting. I can not help you there ; she can ; she will 
probably understand you better than you understand yourself.” 

He tightened his grasp, and gently pushed his guest into a 
chair beside him. Robert was deadly pale, his face quivering 
painfull}^ The long physical strain of the past months had 
weakened for the moment all the controlling forces of the will. 
Mr. Grey stood over him—the whole man dilating, expanding, 
under a tyrannous stress of feeling. 

“ It is hard, it is bitter,” he said slowly, with a wonderful 


300 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


manly tenderness. “I know it, I have gone through it. So 
has many and many a poor soul that you and I have known ! 
But there need be no sting in the world unless we ourselves 
eiivenoin it. I know—oh ! I know very well—the man of the 
world scoffs, but to him avIio has once been a Christian of the 
old sort, the parting with the Christian mythology is the I’end- 
ing asunder of bones and marrow. It means parting with half 
the confidence, half the joy of life ! But take heart,” and the 
tone grew still more solemn, still more penetrating. “ It is the 
education of God ! Do not imagine it will put you further from 
him ! He is in criticism, in science, in doubt, so long as the 
doubt is a pure and honest doubt, as yours is. He is in all life, 
in all thought. The thought of man, as it has shaped itself in 
institutions, in philosophies, in science, in patient critical work, 
or in the life of charity, is the one continuous revelation of God! 
Look for him in it all; see hoAv, little by little, the divine in¬ 
dwelling force, using as its tools—but merely as its tools !— 
man’s physical appetities and conditions,has built up conscience 
and the moral life ; think how every faculty of the mind has 
been trained in turn to take its part in the great work of faith 
upon the visible Avorld ! Love and imagination built up religion 
—shall reason destroy it ? No !—reason is God’s, like the rest ! 
Trust it—trust him. The leading-strings of the past are drop¬ 
ping from you ; they are dropping from the world, not Avanton- 
ly, or by chance, but in the providence of God. Learn the les¬ 
son of your own pain—learn to seek God, not in any single 
event of ])ast histoiy, hut in your own soul —in the constant 
A^erifications of experience, in the life of Christian love. Spirit¬ 
ually you haA'e gone through the last Avrench, I promise it 
you ! You being Avhat you are, nothing can cut this ground 
from under your feet. Whatever may have been the forms 
of human hoVioi, faith, the faith Avhich saves, has alAAuays been 
rooted here ! All things change—creeds and philosophies and 
outward systems—but God remains ! 

“ ‘ Life, that in me has rest, 

As I, undying Life, have power in Thee ! ’ ” 

The lines dropped Avith low, vibrating force from lips unac¬ 
customed indeed to such an outburst. The speaker stood a 
moment longer in silence beside the figure in the chair, and it 
seemed to Robert, gazing at him Avitli fixed eyes, that the man’s 
whole presence, at once so homely and so majestic, Avas charged 
Avitli benediction. It was as though invisible hands of healing 
and consecration had been laid upon him. Tlie fieiy soul be¬ 
side him had kindled anew the drooping life of his own, 


IWBEHT ELSMERE. 


r>91 

So tlie torch of God passes on its way, liand reaching out 
to liand. 

He bent forward, stammering incoherent words of assent and 
gratitude, lie knew not what. Mr. Gre}", Avho had sunk into 
liis chair, gave him time to recover himself. The intensity of 
the tutor’s own mood relaxed ; and presently he began to talk 
to his guest, in a wholh^ different tone, of the practical detail 
of the step before him, supposing it to be taken immediately, 
discussing the probable attitude of Robert’s bishop, the least 
conspicuous mode of withdrawing from the living, and so on— 
all with gentleness and sympathy indeed, but with an indetina- 
ble change of manner, which showed that he felt it well both 
for himself and Elsmere to repress any further expression of 
emotion. There was something, a vein of stoicism perhaps, in 
Mr. Grey’s temper of mind, which, while it gave a special force 
and sacredness to his rare moments of fervent speech, was 
wont in general to make men more self-controlled than usual 
in his presence. Robert felt now the bracing force of it. 

“ Will you stay with us to dinner ? ” Mr. Grey asked when 
at last Elsmere got up to go. “ There are one or two lone 
Fellows coming—asked before j^our telegram came, of course. 
Do exactly as you like.” 

“I think not,” said Robert, after a pause. “I longed to see 
you, but I am not fit for general society.” 

]\[r. Grey did not press him. He rose and Avent with his visi¬ 
tor to the door. 

‘‘ Good-by, good-by ! Let me always know what I can do 
for you. And your wife—poor thing, poor thing ! Go and 
tell her, Elsmere ; don’t lose a moment you can help. God 
help her and ^mu ! ” 

They grasjied each other’s hands. Mr. Grey followed him 
down the stairs and along the narrow hall. He opened the hall 
door, and smiled a last smile of encouragement and sym])athy 
into the eyes that expressed such a young moved gratitude. 
The door closed. Little did Elsmere realize that never, in this 
life, would he see that smile or hear that A^oice again ! 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

In half an hour from the time Mr. Grey’s door closed upon 
him, Elsmere had caught a convenient cross-countiy train, and 
had left the Oxford toAvers, and spires, the shrunken summer 
Isis, and the flat, hot river meadows far behind him. He had 
meant to stay at jMerton, as Ave knoAV for the night. Xoav, his 
one thought Avas to get back to Catherine. The urgency oi 


392 


ROBERT BLSMERE. 


Mr. Grey’s words was upon liim, and love had a miserable 
pang that it should have needed to be urged. 

By eight o’clock he was again at Churton. There were tio 
carriages waiting at the little station, but he thought of the 
walk across the darkening common through the August moon- 
rise had been a refreshment to him in the heat and crowd of the 
train. He hurried through the small town, where the streets 
were full of summer idlers, and the lamps were twinkling in 
the still, balmy air, along a dusty stretch of road, leaving man 
and his dwellings further and further to the rear of him, till at 
last he emerged on a boundless tract of common, and struck to 
the right into a cart-track leading to Mu re well. 

He was on the top of a high sandy ridge, looking west and 
north, over a wide evening world of heather and wood and hill. 
To the right, far ahead, across the misty lower grounds into 
which he was soon to plunge, rose the woods of Murewell, black 
and massive in the twilight distance. To the left, but on a 
nearer plane, the undulating common stretching downward 
from where he stood rose suddenly toward a height crowned 
with a group of gaunt and jagged firs—landmarks for all the 
plain—of which every ghostly bough and crest Avas now sharp¬ 
ly outlined against a luminous sky. For the wide heaven in 
front of him was still delicately glowing in all its under parts 
with soft harmonies of dusky red or blue", Avhile in its higher 
zone the same tract of sky Avas closely covered Avith the finest 
net-Avork of pearl-Avhite cloud, suffused at the moment Avith a 
silver radiance, so intense that a spectator might almost have 
dreamed the moon had forgotten its familiar place of rising, 
and was about to mount into a startled, expectant Avest. Not 
a light in all the wide expanse, and for a Avhile not a sound 
of human life, save in the beat of Robert’s step, or the occa¬ 
sional tap of his stick against the pebbles of the road. 

Presently he reached the edge of the ridge Avhence the rough 
track he Avas folloAving sank sharply to the lower levels. Here 
was a marvelous point of view, and the rector stood a moment, 
beside a bare, weather-blasted fir, a ghostly shadow thrown 
behind him. All around the gorse and heather seemed still 
radiating light, as though the air had been so drenched in sun¬ 
shine that even long after the sun had vanished the invading 
darkness found itself still unable to Avin firm possession of 
'earth and sk}^ Every little stone in the sandy road Avas still 
weirdly visible ; the color of the heather, noAV in lavish bloom, 
could be felt though hardly seen. 

Before him melted line after line of woodland, broken by 
liollow after hollow, filled with vaporous Avi*eaths of mist. About 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


393 


him were the sounds of a wild nature. The air was resonant 
with the purring of the niglit-jars, and every now and then he 
caught the loud clap of their wings as they swayed unsteadily 
through the furze and bracken. Overhead a trio of wild ducks 
flew across, from pond to pond, their hoarse cry descending 
through the darkness. The partridges on the hill called to 
each other, and certain sharp sounds betrayed to the solitary 
listener the presence of a flock of swans on a neighboring pool. 

The rector felt himself alone on a wide earth. It was almost 
with a start of pleasure that he caught at last the barking of 
dogs on a few distant farms, or the dim, thunderous rush of a 
train through the wide wooded landscape beyond the heath. 
Behind that frowning mass of wood lay the rectory. The 
lights must be lighted in the little drawing-room ; Catherine 
must be sitting by the lamp, her fine head bent over book or 
work, grieving for him perhaps, her anxious, expectant heart 
going out to him through the dark. He thinks of the village 
lying wrapped in the peace of the August night, the lamp-rays 
from shop-front or casement streaming out on the green ; he 
thinks of his child, of his dead mother, feeling heavy and bit¬ 
ter within him all the time the message of separation and 
exile. 

But his mood was no longer one of mere dread, of helpless 
})ain, of miserable self-scorn. Contact with Henry Grey had 
brought him to that rekindling of the flame of conscience, that 
medicinal stirring of the soul’s waters, which is the most pre¬ 
cious boon that man can give to man. In that sense which at¬ 
taches to every successive resurrection of our best life from 
the shades of despair or selfishness, he had that day, almost 
that hour, been born again. He was no longer filled mainly 
with the sense of personal failure, with scorn for his own 
blundering, impetuous temper, so lacking in prescience and in 
balance ; or, in respect to his wife, with such an anguished, im¬ 
potent remorse. He was nerved and braced ; whatever oscilla¬ 
tions the mind might go through in its search for another 
equilibrium, to-night there was a moment of calm. The earth 
to him was once more full of God, existence full of value. 

“ The things I have alwa3''s loved, I love still ! ” he had said 
to Mr. Grey. And in this healing darkness it was as if the old 
loves, the old familiar images of thought, returned to him 
new-clad, re-entering the desolate heart in a white-winged pro¬ 
cession of consolation. On the heath beside him tlie Christ 
stood once more, and as the disciple felt the sacred presence he 
could bear for the first time to let the chafing, pent-up current 
of love flow into the new channels so painfully prepared for 


394 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


it by the toil of thought. Either God or an impostor.'''* What 
scorn the heart, the intellect, threw on the alternative ! Not 
in the dress of speculations which represent the product of 
long past, long superseded looms of human thought, but in the 
guise of common manhood, laden like his fellows with the 
pathetic weight of human weakness and human ignorance, 
the Master moves toward him: 

‘‘Like you, my son, I struggled and I prayed. Like you, I 
had my days of doubt and nights of wrestling. I had my 
dreams, my delusions, with my fellows. I was weak ; I suf¬ 
fered ; I died. But God Avas in me, and the courage, the 
])atience, the love he gave to me, the scenes of the poor human 
life he inspired, have become by his will the Avorld’s eternal 
lesson—man’s primer of divine things, hung high in the eyes 
of all, simple and wise, that all may see and ail may learn. 
Lake it to your heart again—that life, that pain, of mine ! 
Use it to new ends; apprehend it in new ways ; but knowl¬ 
edge shall not take it from you ; and love, instead of Aveaken- 
ing or forgetting, if it be but faithful, shall hnd eA^er fresh 
poAver of realizing and reneAAung itself.” 

So said the vision ; and carrying the passion of it deep in 
his heart the rector AA^ent his AA^ay, doAAUi the long stony hill, 
past the solitary farm amid the trees at the foot of it, across 
the grassy common bej^ond, Avith its sentinel clumps of beeches, 
passed an ethereal string of tiny lakes just touched by the 
moonrise, beside some of the hrst cottages of MurcAA^ell, up the 
hill, Avith pulse beating and step quickening, and round into 
the stretch of road leading to his OAvn gate. 

As soon as he had passed the screen made by the shrubs on 
the laAvn, he saAv it all as he had seen it in his AA^aking dream 
on the common—the lamp-light, the open AAundoAvs, the AAdiite 
muslin curtains, SAvaying a little in the soft evening air, and 
Catherine’s figure seen dimly through them. 

The noise of the gate, however—of the steps on the drive— 
had startled her. He saw her rise quickly from her Ioav chair, 
put some Avork down beside her, and move in haste to the 
windoAv. 

“ Kobert ! ” she cried, in amazement. 

“ Yes,” he ansAA'fered, still some yards from her, his voice 
coming strangely to her out of the moonlighted darkness. “ I 
did my errand early; I found I could get back; and here I am.” 

She fleAV to the door, opened it, and felt herself caught in 
his arms. 

“ Robert, you are quite damp,” she said, fluttering and 
shrinking, for all her SAveet habitual gravity of manner— 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


895 


was it the passion of that yeariiinp: embrace? “Have you 
walked?” 

“ Yes. It is the dew on the common, I suppose. The grass 
was drenched.” 

“ Will you have some food ? They can bring back the sup¬ 
per directly.” 

“ I don’t want any food now,” he said, hanging up his hat. 
“ I got some lunch in town, and a cup of soup at Reading com¬ 
ing back. Perhaps you will give me some tea soon—not yet.” 

He came up to her, pushing back the thick, disordered locks 
of hair from his eyes with one hand, the other held out to 
her. As he came under the light of the hall lamp she was so 
startled by the gra}" pallor of the face that she caught hold of 
his outstretched hand with both hers. What she said he never 
knew—her look was enough. He put his arm round her, and 
as he opened the drawing-room door, holding her pressed 
against him, she felt the desperate agitation in him penetrat¬ 
ing, beating against an almost iron self-control of manner. 
He shut the door behind them. 

“ Robert, dear Robert ! ’’ she said, clinging to him, “ there 
is bad news—tell me—there is something to tell me ! Oh ! 
what is it—what is it ? ” 

It was almost like a child’s wail. His brow contracted still 
more painfully. 

“ My darling,” he said; “ my darling—my dear, dear wife ! ” 
and he bent his head down to her as she lay against his breast, 
kissed her hair with a passion of pity, of remorse, of tender¬ 
ness, which seemed to rend his whole nature. 

“ Tell me—tell me—Robert ! ” 

He guided her gently across the room, past the sofa over 
which her work lay scattered, past the flower-table, now a 
many-colored mass of roses, which was her especial pride, past 
the remains of a brick castle which had deliglitcd Maiy’s won¬ 
dering eyes and mischievous fingers an hour or two before, to 
a low chair by the open window looking on the wide moon¬ 
lighted expanse of corn-field. He put her into it, walked to 
the window on the other side of the room, shut it, and drew 
down the blind. Then he went back to her, and sank down 
beside her, kneeling, her hands in his. 

“ My dear wife—you have loved me—you do love me ? ” 

She could not answer, she could only press his hands with 
her cold fingers, with a look and gesture that implored him to 
speak. 

“Catherine,” he said, still kneeling before her, “you re¬ 
member that night you came down to me in the studj^, the 


396 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


iiight I told you I was in trouble and j^ou could not help me. 
Did you guess from wbat I said wliat the trouble was ? ” 

Yes,’’ she answered, trembling, “ yes, I did. Robert ; I 
thought you were depressed—troubled—about religion.” 

“ And I know,” he said, with an outburst of feeling, kissing 
her hands as they lay in his—I know very w’ell that you 
went upstairs and prayed for me, my white-souled angel ! 
But Catherine, the trouble grew—it got blacker and blacker. 
You were there beside me, and you could not help me. I dared 
not tell you about it; I could onh^ struggle on alone, so terri¬ 
bly alone, sometimes ; and now I am beaten, beaten. And I 
come to you to ask j^ou to help me in the only thing that re¬ 
mains to me. Help me Catherine, to be an honest man—to 
follow conscience—to say and do the truth ! ” 

‘‘ Robert,” she said piteously, deadly pale, I don’t under¬ 
stand.” 

“ Oh, my poor darling ! ” he cried, with a kind of moan of 
])ity and misery. Then still holding her, he said, with strong, 
deliberate emphasis, looking into the gray-blue eyes—the quiv¬ 
ering face so full of austerity and delicacy : “For six or seven 
months, Catherine—really for much longer, though I never 
knew it—I have been fighting with doubt —doubt of orthodox 
Christianity—doubt of what the Church teaches—of what I 
have to say and preach about Sunday. First it crept on me I 
knew not how. Then the weight grew heavier and I began to 
sU’uggle with it. I felt I must struggle with it. IMany men, I 
suppose, in my position would have trampled on their doubts— 
would have regarded them as sin in themselves, would have 
felt it their duty to ignore them as much as possiVde, trusting; 
to time and God’s help. I coxdd not ignore them. The 
thought of questioning the most sacred beliefs that j^ou and I 
—and his voice faltered a moment—“ held in common was 
misery to me. On the other hand, I knew myself. I knew 
that I could no more go on living to any purpose, with a 
whole region of the mind shut up, as*it were, barred away from 
the rest of me, than I could go on living to any purpose, with 
a secret between myself and you. I could not hold faith 
by a mere tenure of tyranny and fear. Faith that is not free— 
that is not the faith of the whole creature, body, soul, and intel¬ 
lect—seemed to me a faith worthless both to God and man ! ” 

Catherine looked at him, stupefied. The world seemed to 
be turning round her. Infinitel}^ more terrible than his actual 
words was the accent running through words and tone and 
gesture—the accent of irreparableness, as of something dis¬ 
mally and^m'^Aed What did ft all mean ? For wbat 


nOBKRT ELSMERE. 


397 


liad he bronglit her there ? Slie sat stunned, realizing with 
awful force'the feebleness, the inadequacy, of her own fears. 

He, meanwhile, had paused a moment, meeting her gaze 
with those yearning, sunken eyes. Then he Avent on, his voice 
changing a little : 

“ But if I had Avished it ever so much, I could not have 
helped myself. The process, so to speak,.had gone too far by 
the time I kneAV Avdiere I Avas. I think the change must have 
begun before the Mile End time. Looking back, I see the 
foundations were laid in—in—the Avork of last Avinter,” 

She shivered. He stopped and kissed her hands again pas¬ 
sionately. ‘‘Am I poisoning even the memory of our past for 
you ? ” he cried. Then, restraining himself at once, he hurried 
on again : “ After Mile End you remember I began to see 
much of the squire. Oh, my wife, don’t look at me so ! It 
was not his doing in any true sense. I am not such a Aveak 
shuttlecock as that ! But being Avhere I was before our inti¬ 
macy began, his influence hastened everything. I don’t wish 
to minimize it. I was not made to stand alone ! ” 

And again that bitter, perplexed, half-scornful sense of his 
own pliancy at the hands of circumstance as compared with 
the rigidity of other men descended upon him. Catherine 
made a faint movement as tliough to draw hej* hands away. 

“ Was it well,” she said, in a voice which sounded like a 
harsh echo of her oaaui, “ was it right for a clergyman to dis¬ 
cuss sacred things—with such a man ? ” 

He let her hands go, guided for the moment by a delicate 
imperious instinct Avhich bade him appeal to something else 
than love. Rising, he sat down opposite to her on the low 
window-seat, Avhile she sank back into her chair, her Angers 
clinging to the arm of it, the lamp-light far behind deepening all 
the shadows of the fac^ the liolloAvs in the cheeks, the line of 
experience and will about the mouth. The stupor in which 
she had just listened to him was beginning to break up. Wild 
forces of condemnation and resistance Avere rising in her ; and 
he knew it. He knew too, that as yet she only half realized 
the situation, and that bloAv after blow still remained to him to 
deal. 

“Was it right that I should discuss religious matters with 
the squire ? ” he repeated, his face resting on his hands. 
“ What are religious matters, Catherine, and AAdiat are not? ” 
Then still controlling himself rigidly, his eyes flxed on the 
shadoAvy face of his wife, his ear catching her quick, uneven 
breath, 1ie AA^ent once more through the dismal history of the 
last few months, dwelling on his state of thought before the 


398 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


intimacy with Mr. Wendov'er began, on his first attempts to 
escape the squire’s influence, on his gradual, pitiful surrender. 
Then he told the story of the last memorable walk before the 
squire’s journey, of the moment in the study afterward, and 
of the months of feverish reading and wrestling which had 
followed. Half-way through it a new despair seized him. 
What was the good of all he was saying ? He was speaking a 
language she did not really understand. What were all these 
critical and literary considerations to her ? 

The rigidit}^ of her silence showed him that her sympathy 
was not with him, that in comparison with the vibrating pro¬ 
test of her own passionate faith which must be now ringing 
through her, whatever he could urge must seem to her the 
merest culpable trifling with the soul’s awful destinies. In an 
instant of tumultuous speech he could not convey to her the 
temper and results of his own complex training, and on that 
training, as he very well knew, depended the piercing, con¬ 
vincing force of all that he was saying. There were gulfs be¬ 
tween them—gulfs which, as it seemed to him, in a miserable 
insight, could never be bridged again. Oh, the frightful sepa¬ 
rateness of experience ! 

Still he struggled on. He brought the story down to the 
conversation at the Hall, described—in broken words of fire 
and pain—the moment of spiritual wreck which had come upon 
him in the August lane, his night of struggle, his resolve to go 
to Mr. Grey. And all through he was not so much narrating 
as pleading a cause, and that not his own, but Love’s. Love 
was at the bar, and it was for love that the eloquent voice, the 
pale, varying face, were really pleading, through all the long 
story of intellectual change. 

At the mention of Mr. Grey Catherine grew restless ; she 
sat up suddenly, with a cry of bitterness. 

“ Robert, why did you go away from me ? It was cruel. I 
should have known first. He had no right—no right ! ” 

She clasped her hands round her knees, her beautiful mouth 
set and stern. The moon had been sailing westward all this 
time, and as Catherine bent forward the yellow light caught 
her face, and brought out the haggard change in it. He held 
out his hands to her with a low groan, helpless against her re¬ 
proach, her jealousy. He dared not speak of what Mr. Grey 
had done for him, of the tenderness of his counsel toward her 
specially. He felt that everything he could say would but 
torture the wounded heart still more. 

But she did not notice the outstretched hand. She covered 
her face in silence a moment, as though trying to see her way 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


300 


more clearly through the mazes of disaster ; and he waited. 
At last slie looked up. 

“ I can not follow all you have been saying,” she said, almost 
harshly. “ I know so little of books, I can not give them the 
place you do. You say you have convinced yourself the Gos¬ 
pels are like other books, full of mistakes, and credulous, like 
the people of the time ; and therefore you can’t take what they 
saj^ as you used to take it. But what does it all quite mean ? 
Oh, I am not clever—I can not see my way clear from thing to 
thing as you do. If there are mistakes, does it matter so— 
so—terribly to you ? ” and she faltered. “ Do you think 
nothing is true because something may be false ? Did not— 
did not—Jesus still live, and die, and rise again ?— can you 
doubt— do you doubt—that he rose—that he is God—that 
he is in Heaven—that we shall see him ? ” 

She threw an intensity into every word, which made the 
short, breathless questions thrill through her, through the na¬ 
ture saturated and steeped as hers was in Christian association, 
with a bitter, accusing force. But he did not flinch from them. 

“ I can believe no longer in an Incarnation and Resurrec¬ 
tion,” he said slowly, but with a resolute plainness. “ Christ 
is risen in our hearts, in the Christian life of charity. Miracle 
is a natural product of human feeling and imagination ; and 
God was in Jesus—pre-eminently, as he is in all great souls, 
but not otherwise—not otherwise in kind than he is in me 
or you.” 

His voice dropped to a whisper. She grew paler and paler. 

“ So to you,” she said presently, in the same strange, altered 
voice, “ My father—when I saw that light on his face before 
he died, when I heard him cry, ‘ Master, I come ! ’ was dy¬ 
ing—deceived—deluded. Perhaps even,” and she trembled, 
‘‘ you think it ends here—our life—our love ? ” 

It was agony to him to see her driving herself through this 
piteous catechism. The lantern of memory flashed a moment 
on to the immortal picture of Faust and Margaret. Was it 
not only that winter they had read the scene together? 

Forcibly he possessed himself once more of those closely 
locked hands, pressing their coldness on his own burning eyes 
and forehead in hopeless silence. 

‘‘ Do you, Robert ? ” she repeated insistently. 

“ I know nothing,” he said, his eyes still hidden. “I know 
nothing ! But I trust God with all that is dearest to me, with 
our love, with the soul that is his breath, his Work in us ! ” 

The pressure of her des])air seemed to be wringing his 
own faith out of him, forcing into definiteness things and 


400 


HOBEItT ELSMFAIE. 


thoughts that had been lying in an accepted, even a welcomed, 
obscurity. 

She tried again to draw her hands away, but he would not 
let them go. “ And the end of it all, Robert ? ” she said— 
“ the end of it?” 

Never did he forget the tone of that question, the desolation 
of it, the indefinable change of accent. It drove him into a 
harsh abruptness of reply. 

“ The end of it—so far—must be, if I remain an honest man, 
that I must give up my living, that I must cease to be a min¬ 
ister of the Church of England. What course of our life 
after that shall be is in your hands—absolutely.” 

She caught her breath painfull}^ Ilis heart was breaking 
for her, and yet there was something in her manner now which 
kept down caresses and repressed all words. 

Suddenly, however, as he sat there mutely watching her, he 
found her at his knees, her dear arms around him, her face 
against his breast. 

“ Robert, my husband, my darling, it can not be ! It is a 
madness—a delusion. God is trying you, and me ! You can 
not be planning so to desert him, so to deny Christ—you can 
not, my husband. Come away with me, away from books and 
work, into some quiet place where lie can make himself 
heard. You are overdone, overdriven. Do nothing now— 
say nothing—except to me. Be patient a little, and He will 
give you back himself ! What can books or arguments 
matter to you or me ? Have we not known and felt Him as 
he is—have we not, Robert ? Come ! ” 

She pushed herself backward, smiling at him with an ex¬ 
quisite tenderness. The tears were streaming down her cheeks. 
They were wet on his own. Another moment and Robert 
would have lost the only clew which remained to him through 
the mists of this bewildering world. He would have yielded 
again as he had many times yielded before, for infinitely less 
reason, to the urgent pressure of another’s individuality, and 
having jeopardized love for truth, he would now have mur¬ 
dered or tried to murder—in himself the sense of truth for love. 

But he did neither. 

Holding her close pressed against him, he said, in breaks of 
intense speech : If you wish, Catherine, I will wait—I will 
wait till you bid me speak—but I warn you—there is some¬ 
thing dead in me—something gone and broken. It can never 
live again—except in forms which now it would only pain you 
more to think of. It is not that I think differently of this point 
or that point—but of life and religion together. I see God’s 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


401 


purposes in quite other proportions, as it were. Christianity 
seems to me something small and local. Behind it, around 
it—including it—I see the great drama of the world, sweeping 
on—led by God—from change to change, from act to act. It 
is not that Christianity is false, but that it is only an imperfect 
human reflection of a part of truth. Truth has never been, 
can never be, contained in any one creed or system ! ” 

She heard, but through her exhaustion, through the bitter 
sinking of hope, she only half understood. Only she realized 
that she and he were alike helpless—both struggling in the grip 
of some force outside themselves, inexorable, ineluctable. 

Robert felt her arms relaxing, felt the dead weight of her 
form againt him. He raised her to her feet, he half carried 
her to the door, and on to the stairs. She was nearly fainting, 
but her will held it at bay. He threw open the door of their 
room, led her in, lifted her—unresisting—on to the bed. Then 
her head fell on one side, and her lips grew ashen. In an in¬ 
stant or two he had done for her all that his medical knowl¬ 
edge could suggest with rapid, decided hands. She was not 
quite unconscious ; she drew up round her, as though with a 
strong vague, sense of chill, the shawl he laid over her, and 
gradually the slightest shade of color came back to her lips. 
But as soon as she opened her eyes and met those of Robert 
fixed upon her, the heavy lids dropped again. 

“ Would you rather be alone ? ” he said to her, kneeling be¬ 
side her. 

She made a faint affirmative movement of the head, and the 
cold hand he had been chafing tried feeblj^ to withdraw itself. 
He rose at once, and stood a moment beside her, looking down 
at her. Then he went. 

CHAPTER XXIX. 

He shut the door softly and went downstairs again. It was 
between ten and eleven. The lights in the lower passage were 
just extinguished; every one else in the honse had gone to bed. 
Mechanically he stooped and put away the child’s bricks, he 
pushed the chairs back into their ])laces, and then he paused 
awhile before the open window. But there was not a tremor 
on the set face. He felt himself capable of no more emotion. 
The fount of feeling, of pain, was for the moment dried up. 
, What he was mainly noticing was the effect of some occasional 
’ gusts of night-wind on the moonlighted corn-field ; the silver 
ripples they sent thi-ough it ; the shadows thrown by some 
great trees in the western corners of the field ; the glory of 
the moon itself in the pale immensity of the sky. 


402 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


Presently he turned away, leaving one lamp still burning in 
the room, softly unlocked the hall door, took his hat, and went 
out. He walked up and down the wood-path or sat on the 
bench there for some time, thinking indeed, but thinking with 
a certain stern, practical dryness. Whenever he felt the thrill 
of feeling stealing over him again, he would make a sharp 
elfort at repression. Physically be could not bear much more, 
and he knew it. A part remained for him to play, which must 
be played with tact, with prudence, and with firmness. 
Strength and nerves had been suHiciently weakened alread}". 
For his wife’s sake, liis people’s sake, his honorable reputa¬ 
tion’s sake, he must guard himself from a collapse Avhich 
might mean far more than physical failure. 

So in the most patient, methodical way he began to plan out 
the immediate future. As to waiting, the matter was still in 
Catherine’s hands ; but he knew that finely tempered soul ; he 
knew that when she had mastered her poor \vomaii’s self, as 
she had always mastered it from her childhood, she would not 
bid him wait. lie hardly took the possibility into considera¬ 
tion. The proposal had had some reality in his eyes when he 
went to see Mr. Gray ; now it had none, though he could 
hardly have explained why. 

lie had already made arrangements with an old Oxford 
friend to take his duty during his absence on the Continent. 
It had been originall}^ suggested that this Mr. Armitstead 
should come to Murewell on the Monda}'' following the Sunday 
they were now approaching, spend a few days with them^, 
before their departure, and be left to his own devices in the 
house and parish, about the Thursday or Friday. An intense 
desire now seized Robert to get hold of the man at once, before 
the next Sundaj^ It was strange’ how the interview with his 
wife seemed to have crystallized, precipitated everything. 
IIow infinitely more real the whole matter looked to him since 
the afternoon ! It had passed—at any rate for the time—out 
of the region of thought, into the hurrying evolution of action, 
and as soon as action began it was characteristic of Robert’s 
ra})id, energetic nature to feel this thirst to make it as prompt, 
as complete, as possible. The fiery soul yearned for a fresh 
consistency, though it were a consistency of loss and renun¬ 
ciation. 

To-morrow he must write to the bishop. The bishop’s resi¬ 
dence was only eight or ten miles from Murewell ; he supposed 
his interview with him would take place about Monday or 
Tuesday. He could see the tall, stooping figure of the kindly 
old man rising to meet him ; he knew exactly the sort of argu- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


403 


ments that would he brought to bear upon him. Oh, that it 
were done with—this wearisome dialectical necessity ! His 
life for months had been one long argument. If he were but 
left free to feel and live again ! 

The practical matter which weighed most heavily upon him 
was the function connected with the opening of the new insti¬ 
tute, which had been fixed for the Saturday—the next day but 
one. How was he—^but much more how was Catherine—to get 
through it ? His lips would be sealed as to any possible with¬ 
drawal from the living, for he could not by then have seen 
the bishop. He looked forward to the gathering, the crowds, 
the local enthusiasm, the signs of his own popularity, with a 
sickening distaste. The one thing real to him through it 
all would be Catherine’s white face, and their bitter joint 
consciousness. 

And then he said to himself, sharply, that his own feelings 
counted for nothing. Catherine should be tenderly shielded 
from all avoidable pain, but for himself there must be no 
flinching, no self-indulgent weakness. Did he not owe every 
last hour he had to give to the people among whom he had 
planned to spend the best energies of life, and from whom his 
OAvn act was about to part him in this lame, impotent fashion ? 

Midnight ! The sounds rolled silverly out, effacing the soft 
murmurs of the night. So the long, interminable day was 
over, and a new morning had begun. He rose, listening to 
the echoes of the bell, and—as the tide of feeling surged back 
upon him—passionately commending the new-born day to God. 

Then he turned toward the house, put the light out in the 
drawing-room, and went upstairs, stepping cautiously. He 
opened the door of Catherine’s room. The moonliglit was 
streaming in through the white blinds. Catherine, who had 
undressed, was lying now with her face hidden in the pillow, 
and one white-sleeved arm flung across little Mary’s cot. The 
night was hot, and the child would evidently have thrown 
off all its coverings had it not been for the mother’s hand, 
which lay lightly on the tiny shoulder, keeping one thin 
blanket in its place. 

Catherine,” he whispered, standing beside her. 

She turned, and by the light of the candle he held shaded 
from her he saw the austere remoteness of her look, as of one 
who had been going through deep waters of misery, alone 
wdth God. His heart sank. For the first time that look 
seemed to exclude him from her inmost life. 

He sank down beside her, took the hand lying on the child, 
and laid down his head upon it, mutely kissing it. But he said 


404 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


nothing. Of what further avail could words be just then to 
either of them ? Only he felt through every fiber the cold¬ 
ness, the irresponsiveness of those fingers lying in his. 

“ Would it prevent your sleeping,” he asked her presently, 
“ if I came to read here, as I used to when you were ill ? I 
could shade the light from you, of course.” 

She raised her head suddenly. 

But you—you ought to sleep.” 

Her tone was anxious, but strangely quiet and aloof. 

‘‘Impossible ! ” he said, pressing his hand over his eyes as 
he rose. “ At any rate, I will read first.” 

His sleeplessness at any time of excitement or strain w^as so 
inveterate, and so familiar to them both by now, tliat she could 
say nothing. She turned away with a long, sobbing breath, 
which seemed to go through her from head to foot. He stood 
a moment beside her, fighting strong impulses of remorse and 
passion, and ultimately maintaining silence and self-control. 

In another minute or two he was sitting beside her feet, in a 
low chair drawn to the edge of tiie bed, the light arranged so 
as to reach his book without touching either mother or child. 
He had run over the book-shelf in his own room, shrinking 
painfully from any of his common religious favorites as one 
shrinks from touching a still sore and throbbing nerve, and 
had at last carried off a volume of Spenser. 

And so the night began to wear away. For the first hour or 
two, every now and then, a stifled sob would make itself just 
faintly heard. It was a sound to wring the heart, for what it 
meant-was that not even Catherine Elsmere’s extraordinary 
powers of self-suppression could avail to check the outward ex¬ 
pression of an inward torture. Each time it came and went, it 
seemed to Elsmere that a fraction of his jmuth went with it. 

At last exhaustion brought her a restless sleep. As soon a.s 
Elsmere caught the light breathing which told him she was 
not conscious of her grief, or of him, his book slipped on to 
Ids knees. 

“ Open the temple gates unto my love, 

Open them wide that she may enter in, 

And all the posts adorn as doth behove 
And all the pillars deck with garlands trim, 

For to receive this saint with honor due 
That cometh in to yon. 

With trembling steps and humble reverence, 

She cometh in before the Almighty’s view.” 

The leaves fell over as the boflv dropped, and these lines, 
which had been to him, as to other lovers, the utterance of his 


nOBFMT EL8MERE. 


40 “) 


Own bridal joy, emerged. They brouglit about him a liost of 
images—a little gray church penetrated everywhere by the 
roar of a swollen river ; outside, a road filled with empty 
farmers’ carts, and shouting children carrying branches of 
mountain-ash—winding on and up into the heart of wild hills 
dyed with reddening fern, the sun-gleams stealing from crag 
to crag and shoulder to shoulder: inside, row after row of in¬ 
tent faces, all turned toward the central passage, and, moving 
toward him, a figure “ clad all in white, that seems a virgin 
best,” whose every step brings nearer to him the heaven of his 
heart’s desire. Everything is plain to him—Mrs. Thornburgh’s 
round cheeks and marvelous curls and jubilant airs, Mrs. Ley- 
burn’s mild and tearful pleasure, the vicar’s solid satisfaction. 
With what confiding joy had those who loved her given her to 
him ! And he knows well that out of all griefs, the grief he 
has brought upon her in two short years is the one which will 
seem to her hardest to bear. Very few women of the present 
day could feel this particular calamity as Catherine Elsmere 
must feel it. 

“Was it a crime to win and love you, my darling?” he 
cried to her in his heart. “ Ought I have had more self-knowl¬ 
edge ? could I have guessed where I was taking you ? Oh, 
how could I know—how could I know ! ” 

But it was impossible to him to sink himself wholly in the 
past. Inevitably such a nature as Elsmere’s turns very quickly 
from despair to hope; from the sense of failure to the passion¬ 
ate planning of new effort. In time will he rot be able to com¬ 
fort her, and, after a miserable moment of transition, to repair 
her trust in him and make their common life once more rich 
toward God and man ? There must be painful readjustment 
and friction, no doubt. He tries to see the facts as they truly 
are, fighting against his own optimist tendencies, and realizing 
as best he can all the changes which his great change must in¬ 
troduce into their most intimate relations. But after all can 
love and honest and a clear conscience do nothing to bridge 
over, nay, to efface, such differences as theirs will be ? 

Oh, to bring her to understand him ! At this moment he 
shrinks painfully from the thought of touching her faith—his 
own sense of loss is too heavy, too terrible. But if she will 
only be still open with him !—still give him her deepest heart, 
any lasting difference between them will surely be impossible. 
Each will complete the other, and love knit up the raveled 
strands again into a stronger unity. 

Gradually he lost himself in half-articulate prayer, in the 
solemn girding of the will to this future task of re-creating 


400 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


love. And by the time the moi'iiiiig light had well established 
itself sleep had fallen on him. When he became sensible of tlie 
longed-for drowsiness, he merely stretched out a tired liand 
and drew over him a shawl hanging at the foot oF the bed. 
He was too utterl}^ worn out to think of moving. 

When he woke the sun was streaming into the room, and 
behind him sat the tiny Mary on the edge of the bed, the 
rounded apple cheeks and wild-bird eyes aglow with mischief 
and delight. She had climbed out of her cot, and, finding no 
check to her progress had crept on, till now she sat trium¬ 
phantly, with one diminutive leg and rosy foot doubled under 
her, and her father’s thick hair at the mercy of her invading 
fingers, Avhich, however, were as yet touching him half 
timidly, as though something in his sleep had awed the baby 
sense. 

But Catherine was gone. 

He sprang up with a start. Mary was frightened by the 
abrupt movement, perhaps disappointed by the escape of her 
prey, and raised a sudden wail. 

He carried her to her nurse, even forgetting to kiss the little 
wet cheek, ascertained that Catherine was not in the house, 
and then came back, miserable, with the bewilderment of 
sleep still upon him. A sense of wrong rose high within him. 
How could she have left him thus without a word ? 

It had been her way, sometimes, during the summer, to go 
out early to one or other of the sick folk who were under her 
especial charge. Possibly she had gone to a woman, just con¬ 
fined, on the further side of the village, who yesterday had 
been in danger. 

But, whatever explanation he could make for himself, he 
was none the less irrationally wretched. He bathed, dressed, 
and sat down to his solitary meal in a state of tension and 
agitation indescribable. All the exaltation, the courage of the 
night, was gone. 

Nine o’clock, ten o’clock, and no sign of Catherine. 

“ Your mistress must have been detained somewhere,” he 
said, as quietly and carelessly as he could to Susan, the parlor¬ 
maid, who had been with them since their marriage. “ Leave 
breakfast things for one.” 

“Mistress took a cup of milk when she went out, cook 
says,” observed the little maid, with a consoling intention, 
wondering the Avhile at the rector’s haggard mien'and restless 
movements. 

“ Nursing other people indeed ! ” she observed severely, 
downstairs, glad as we all are at times to pick holes in excel- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


407 


lence which is inconveniently high. ‘‘Missis had a deal 
better stay at home and nurse him ! ” 

The day was excessively hot. Not a leaf moved in the gar¬ 
den ; over the corn-field the air danced in long vibrations of 
heat; the woods and hills beyond were indistinct and colorless. 
Their dog Dandy lay sleeping in the sun, waking up every now 
and then to avenge himself on the flies. On the far edge of the 
corn-field reaping was beginning. Robert stood on the edge of 
the sunk fence, his blind eyes resting on the line of men, his 
ear catching the shouts of the farmer directing operations from 
Ids gray horse. He could do nothing. The night before, in 
the wood-path, he had clearly mapped out the day’s work. A 
mass of business was waiting, clamoring to be done. He tried 
to begin on this or that, and gave up everything with a groan, 
wandering out again to the gate on to the wood-path to sweep 
the distances of the road or field with hungry, straining eyes. 

The wildest fears had taken possession of him. Running in 
his head was a passage from “ The Confessions,” describing 
Monica’s horror of her son’s heretical opinions: “Shrinking 
from and detesting the blasphemies of his error, she began to 
doubt whether it was right in her to allow her son to live in her 
house and to eat at the same table wdth her and the mother’s 
heart, he remembered, could only be convinced of the lawful¬ 
ness of its own yearning by a prophetic vision of the youth’s 
conversion. He recalled, with a shiver, how in the life of Mrne. 
Gu^mn, after describing the painful and agonizing death of a 
kind but comparatively irreligious husband, she quietly adds : 
“ As soon as I heard that my husband had just expired, I said 
to Thee, O my God, thou hast broken my bonds, and I will 
offer to thee a sacrifice of praise ! ” He thought of John Henry 
Newman, disowning all the ties of kinship with his younger 
brother because of divergent views on the question of baptismal 
regeneration; of the long tragedy of Blanco White’s life,caused 
by the slow dropping-off of friend after friend, on the ground 
of heretical belief. What right had he, or any one in such a 
strait as his, to assume that the faith of the present is no 
longer capable of the same stern, self-destructive consistency as 
the faith of the past ? He knew that to such Christian purity, 
such Christian inwardness as Catherine’s, the ultimate sanction 
and legitimacy of marriage rest, both in theory and practice, 
on a common acceptance of the definite commands and prom¬ 
ises of a miraculous revelation. He had a proof of it in Cath¬ 
erine’s passionate repugnance to the idea of Rose’s marriage 
with Edward Langham. 

Eleven o’clock striking from the distant tower. He walked 


408 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


desperately along the wood-path, meaning to go through tho 
copse at the end of it toward the park, and look there. He had 
just passed into the copse, a thick, interwoven mass of young 
trees, when he heard the sound of the gate which on the further 
side of it led on to the road. He hurried on; the trees closed 
behind him; the grassy path broadened; and there, under an 
arch of young oak and liazel, stood Catherine, arrested by the 
sound of his step. He, too, stopped at the sight of her; he 
could not go on. Husband and wife looked at each other one 
long, quivering moment. Tlien Catherine sprang forward 
with a sob and threw herself on liis breast. 

They clung to each other, she in a passion of tears—tears of 
such self-abandonment as neither Robert nor any other living 
soul had ever seen Catherine Elsmere shed before. As for him, 
he was trembling from head to foot, his arms scarcely strong 
enough to hold her, his young, worn face bent down over her. 

“ Oh, Robert ! ” she sobbed at last, putting up her hand and 
touching his hair, ‘‘ you look so pale, so sad.” 

“1 have you again ! ” he said simply. 

A thrill of remorse ran through her. 

“ I went away,” she murmured, her face still hidden—“ I 
went awaj^, because when I woke up it all seemed to me, sud¬ 
denly, too ghastly to be believed; I could not stay still and 
bear it. But, Robert, Robert, I kissed you as I passed ! I 
was so thankful you could sleep a little and forget. I hardly 
know where I have been most of the time—I think I have been 
sitting in a corner of the park, where no one ever comes. 
I began'to think of all you said to me last night—to put it to¬ 
gether—to try and understand it, and it seemed to me more 
and more horrible ! I thought of what it would be like to 
have to hide my prayers from you—my faith in Christ—my 
hope of heaven. I though of bringing up the child—how all 
that was vital to me would be a superstition to you, which you 
would bear with for my sake. I thought of death,” and she 
shuddered—“ your death, or my death, and how this change 
in you would cleave a gulf of misery between us. And then 
I thought of losing my own faith, of denying Christ. It was 
a nightmare—I saw myself on a long road, escaping with 
Mary in my arms, escaping from you ! Oh Robert ! it wasn’t 
only for myself,”—and she clung to him as though she were a 
child, confessing, explaining away, some grievous fault hardly to 
be forgiven. “ I was agonized by the thought that I was not 
my own—I and my child were ChrisVs. Could I risk what Avas 
his ? Other men and women had died, had given up all for 
his sake. Is there no one now strong enough to suffer torment, 


liOBERT EL8MERE. 


409 


to kill even love itself rather than deny him—rather than 
crucify him afresh ? ” 

She paused, struggling for breath. The terrible excitement 
of that by-gone moment had seized upon her again and com¬ 
municated itself to him. 

“ And then—and then,” she said, sobbing, “ I don’t know 
how it was. One moment I was sitting up looking straight 
before me, Avithout a tear, thinking of Avhat was the least I 
must do, even—even—if you and I stayed together—of all the 
hard compacts and conditions I must make—judging you all 
the Avhile from a long, long distance, and feeling as though I 
had buried the old self—sacrificed the old heart—forever ! 
And the next I Avas lying on the ground crying for you, 
Robert, crying for you ! Your fa'ce had come back to me as 
you laj^ there in the early morning light. I thought how I had 
kissed you—hoAV pale and gray and thin you looked. Oh, how 
I loathed myself ! That I should think it could be God’s will 
that I should leave you, or torture you, my poor husband ! I 
had not only been wicked toward you—I had offended Christ. 
I could think of nothing as I lay there—again and again— 
but ‘ Little children, love one another ; little children, love one 
another. ’’ Oh, my beloved ”—and she looked up Avith the 
solemnest, tenderest smile breaking on the marred, tear-stained 
face—“ I Avill never give up hope, I will pray for you night and 
day. God will bring you back. You can not lose yourself 
so. No, no ! Ilis grace is stronger than our wills. But I will 
not preach to you—I will not persecute you—I Avill only live 
beside you—in your heart—and love you ahvays. Oh, how 
could I—how could I have such thoughts ! ” 

And again she broke off, weeping, as if to the tender, torn 
heart the only crime that could not be forgiven was its OAvn 
offense against love. As for him, he was beyond speech. If 
he had ever lost his vision' of God his wife’s love would that 
moment have given it back to him. 

“ Robert,” she said presently, urged on by the sacred yearn¬ 
ing to heal, to atone, “ I will not complain—I will not ask you 
to wait. I take your Avord for it that it is best not, that it 
Avould do no good. The only hope is in time—and prayer. I 
must suffer, dear, I must be weak sometimes ; but oh, I am so 
sorry for you ! Kiss me, forgive me, Robert ; I will be your 
faithful AAufe unto our lives’ end.” 

He kissed her, and in that kiss, so sad, so pitiful, so cling¬ 
ing, their new life was born. 


410 


liOBERT ELSMERE. 


CHAPTER XXX. 

But the problem of tliese two lives was not solved by a 
burst of feeling. Witliout that determining impulse of love 
and pity in Catherine’s heart the salvation of an exquisite bond 
might indeed have been impossible. But in spite of it the 
laws of character had still to work themselves inexorably out 
on either side. 

The whole gist of the matter for Elsmere lay really in this 
question : Hidden in Catherine’s nature, was there, or was 
there not, the true stuff of fanaticism ? Mme. Guyon left her 
infant children to the mercies of cliance, wliile she followed 
the voice of God to the holy war with heresy. Under similar 
conditions Catherine Elsmere might have planned the same. 
Could she ever have carried it out ? 

And yet the question is still ill stated. For the influences of 
our modern time on religious action are so blunting and dull¬ 
ing, because in truth the religious motive itself is being coii- 
stantl}^ modified, whether the religious person knows it or not. 
Is it possible now for a good woman with a heart, in Catherine 
Elsmere’s position, to maintain herself against love, and all 
those subtle forces to which such a change as Elsmere’s opens 
the house doors, without either hardening, or greatly yielding ? 
Let Catherine’s further story give some sort of an answer. 

Poor soul ! As they sat together in the study, after he had 
brought her home, Robert, with averted eyes, went through the 
plans he had already thought into shape. Catherine listened, 
saying'almost nothing.. But never, never had she loved this 
life of theirs so well as now that she was called on, at barely a 
week’s notice, to give it up forever ! For Robert’s scheme, in 
which her reason fully acquiesced, was to keep to their plan of 
going to Switzerland, he having first, of course, settled all 
things with the bishop, and having placed his living in the 
hands of Mowbray Elsmere. When they left the rectory, in a 
week or ten days’ time, he proposed, in fact, his voice almost 
inaudible as he did so, that Catherine should leave it for 
good. 

“ Everybody had better suppose,” he said, choking, “ that 
we are coming back. Of course we need say nothing. Armit- 
stead will be here for next week certainly. Then afterward I 
can come down and .manage everything. I shall get it over 
in a day if I can, and see nobodv. I can not sav srood-bv, 
nor can you.” 

“ And next Sunday, Robert ? ” she asked him, after a pause. 

“ I shall write to Arinitstead this afternoon, and ask him, if 


nOBERT EL8MERE. 


411 


he possibly can, to come to-morrow afternoon, instead of Mon¬ 
day, and take the service.” 

Catherine’s hands clasped each other still more closely. So 
then she had heard her husband’s voice for the last time in the 
public niinistry of the Church, in prayer, in exhortation, in 
benediction ! One of the most sacred traditions of her life was 
struck from her at a blow. 

It was long before either of them spoke again. Then she 
ventured another question. 

“ And have you any idea of what we shall do next, Robert— 
of—of our future ? ” 

Shall we try London for a little ? ” he answered, in a queer, 
strained voice, leaning against the window, and looking out, 
that he might not see her. “ I should find work among the 
poor—so would you—and I could go on with my book. And 
your mother and sister will probably be there part of the 
winter.” 

She acquiesced silently. How mean and shrunken a future 
it seemed to them both, beside the wide and honorable range 
of his clergyman’s life as he and she had developed it. But she 
did not dwell long on that. Her thoughts were suddenly in¬ 
vaded by the memory of a cottage tragedy in which she had 
recently taken a prominent part. A girl, a child of fifteen, 
from one of the crowded Mile End hovels, had gone at Christ¬ 
mas to a distant farm as servant, and come back a month ago, 
ruined, the victim of an outrage over Avhich Elsmere had 
ground his teeth in fierce and helpless anger. Catherine had 
found her shelter, und was to see her through her “trouble”; 
the girl, a frail, half-witted creature, who could find no words 
even to bewail herself, clinging to her the while with the 
dumbest, pitifulest tenacity. 

How could she leave that girl ? It was as if all the fibers of 
life were being violently wrenched from all their natural con¬ 
nections. 

“ Robert ! ” she cried at last, with a start. “ Had you for¬ 
gotten the institute to-morrow ? ” 

“ No—no,’' he said, with the saddest smile. “ No, I had not 
forgotten it. Don’t go, Catherine—don’t go. I must. But 
why should you go through it ? ” 

“ But there are all those flags and wreaths,” she said, getting 
up in pained bewilderment. “ I must go and look after them.” 

He caught her in his arms. 

“ Oh, my wife, my wife, forgive me ! ” It was a groan of 
misery. She put up her hands and pressed his hair back from 
his temples. 


412 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


“I love you, Robert,” she said simply, her face colorless 
but perfectly calm. 

Half an hour later, after he had worked through some let¬ 
ters, he went into the work-room and found her surrounded 
with flags, and a vast litter of paper roses and evergreens, 
which she and the new agent’s daughters, who had come up to 
help her, were putting together for the decorations of the mor¬ 
row. Mary was tottering from chair to chair in high glee, a 
big pink rose stuck in the belt of her pinafore. His pale wife 
trying to smile and talk as usual, her lap full of evergreens, 
and her politeness exercised by the chatter of the two Miss 
Batesons, seemed to Robert one of the most pitiful sj^ectacles 
he had ever seen. He fled from it out into the village, driven 
by a restless longing for change and movement. 

Here he found a large gathering round the new institute. 
There were carpenters at work on a triumphal arch in front, 
and, close by, an admiring circle of children and old men, 
huddling in the shade of a great chestnut. 

Elsmere spent an hour in the building, helping and super¬ 
intending, stabbed every now and then by the unsuspecting 
friendliness of those about him, or worried by their blunt com¬ 
ments on his looks. He could not bear more than a glance 
into the new rooms apportioned to the Naturalists’ Club. 
There against the wall stood the new glass case he had wrung 
out of the squire, with various new collections lying near, ready 
to be arranged and unpacked when time allowed. The old col¬ 
lections stood out bravely in the added space and light ; the 
walls were hung here and there with a wonderful set of geo¬ 
graphical pictures he had carried off from a London exhibition 
and fed his boys on for weeks ; the floors were freshly matted; 
tlie new pine fittings gave out their pleasant, cleanly scent; the 
white paint of doors and windows shone in the August sun. 
The building had been given by the squire. The fittings and 
furniture had been mainly of his providing. AVhat uses he had 
planned for it all !—only to see tlie fruits of two years’ effort 
out-of-doors, and personal frugality at home, lianded over to 
some possibly unsympathetic stranger. The heart beat pain¬ 
fully against the iron bars of fate, rebelling against the power 
of a mental process so to affect a man’s whole practical and 
social life. 

He went out at last by the back of the institute, where a 
little bit of garden, spoiled with building materials, led down 
to a lane. 

At the end of the garden, beside the untidy gap in the 
hedge made by the builders’ carts, he saw a man standing, 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


413 


who turned away down the lane, however, as soon as the 
rector’s figure emerged into view. 

Robert had recognized the slouching gait and unwieldy form 
of Henslowe. There were at this moment all kinds of grew- 
some stories afloat in the village about the ex-agent. It was 
said that he was breaking up fast; it was known that he was 
extensively in debt; and the village shop-keepers had already 
held an agitated meeting or two, to decide upon the best mode 
of getting their money out of him, and upon a joint plan of 
cautious action toward his custom in future. The man, indeed, 
was sinking deeper and deeper into a pit of sordid misery, main¬ 
taining all the wdiile a snarling, exasperating front to the world, 
which was rapidly converting the careless, half-malicious pity 
wherewith the village had till now surveyed his fall into that 
more active species of baiting which the human animal is never 
very loath to try upon the limping specimens of his race. 

Henslowe stopped and turned as he heard the steps behind 
him. Six months’ self-murdering had left ghastly traces. He 
was many degrees nearer the brute than he had been even when 
Robert made his ineffectual visit. But at this actual moment 
Robert’s practiced eye—for every English parish clergyman 
becomes dismally expert in the pathology of drunkenness— 
saw that there was no fight in him. ‘ He was in one of the 
drunkard’s periods of collapse—shivering, flabby, starting at 
every sound, a misery to himself and a spectacle to others. 

‘‘ Mr. Henslowe ! ” cried Robert, still pursuing him, “ may 
I speak to you a moment ? ” 

The ex-agent turned, his prominent bloodshot eyes glower¬ 
ing at the speaker. But he had to catch at his stick for 
support, or at the nervous shock of Robert’s summons his 
legs would have given way under him. 

Robert came up with him and stood a second, fronting the 
evil silence of the other, his bo^dsh face deeply flushed. Per¬ 
haps the grotesqueness of that former scene was in his mind. 
Moreover, the vestry meetings had furnished Henslowe with 
periodical opportunities for venting his gall on the rector, and 
they had never been neglected. But he plunged on boldly. 

“ I am going away next week, Mr. Henslowe ; I shall be 
away some considerable time. Before I go I should like to 
ask you whether you do not think the feud between us had 
better cease. Why will you persist in making an enemy of 
me ? If I did you an injury it was neither wittingly nor will¬ 
ingly. I know you have been ill, and I gather that—tliat—you 
are in trouble. If I could stand between you and further mis¬ 
chief I would—most gladly. If help—or—or money—” He 


414 


ROBEliT ELSMERE. 


paused. He shrewdly suspected, indeed, from the reports that 
reached liim, that Henslowe was on the brink of bankruptcy. 

The rector had spoken with the utmost diffidence and deli¬ 
cacy, but Henslowe found energy in return for an outburst of 
quavering animosity, from which, however, physical weakness 
had extracted all its sting. 

“ I’ll thank 5 mu to make your canting offers to some one 
else, Mr. Elsmere. When I want jmur advice I’ll ask it. 
Good-day to you.” And he turned away with as much of an 
attempt at dignity as his shaking limbs would allow of. 

‘‘ Listen, Mr. Henslowe,” said Robert firmly, walking beside 
him ; “you know—I know—that if this goes on, in a year’s 
time you will be in your grave, and your poor wife and chil¬ 
dren struggling to keep themselves from the work-house. You 
may think that I have no right to preach to you—that you are 
the older man—that it is an intrusion. But what is the good 
of blinking facts that you must know all the world knows ? 
Come, now, Mr. Henslowe, let us behave for a moment as 
though this was our last meeting. Who knows ? the chances 
of life are many. Lay down your grudge against me, and 
let me speak to jmu as one struggling human being to another. 
The fact that you have, as you say, become less prosperous, in 
some sort through me, seem to give me a right—to make it a 
duty for me, if you will—to help you if I can. Let me send a 
good doctor to see you. Let me implore you as a last chance 
to put yourself into his hands, and to obey him, and your wife ; 
and let me ”—the rector hesitated—“ let me make things pecu- 
niarilj'^ easier for Mrs. Henslowe till you have pulled yourself 
out of the hole in which, by common report at least, you are 
now.” 

Henslowe stared at him, divided between anger caused by 
the sore stirring of his old self-importance, and a tumultuous 
flood of self-pity, roused irresistibl}^ in him by Robert’s piercing 
frankness, and added by his own more or less maudlin condi¬ 
tion. The latter sensation quickly undermined the former ; he 
turue«i his back on the rector and leaned over the railings of 
the lane shaken by something it is hardly worth while to 
dignif}^ by the name of emotion. Robert stood by, a pale em¬ 
bodiment of mingled judgment and compassion. He gave the 
man a few moments to recover himself, and then, as Henslowe 
turned round again, he silentl}" and appenlingl}^ held out his 
hand—the hand of the good man, which it was an honor for 
such as HensloAve to touch. Constrained by the moral force 
radiating from his look, the other took it with a kind of help¬ 
less sullenness. 


ROBEHT ELSMEllE. 


415 


Tlieii, seizing at once on the slight concession, with that 
complete lack of inconvenient self-conscionsness, or hindering 
indecision, which was one of the chief causes of his effect on 
men and women, Robert began to sound the broken, repulsive 
creature as to his affairs. Bit by bit, compelled by a will and 
nervous strength far superior to his own, Henslowe was led 
into abrupt and blurted confidences which surj)rised no one so 
much as himself. Robert’s quick sense possessed itself of point 
after point, seeing presently wa3^s of escape and relief which 
the besotted brain beside him had been quite incapable of de- » 
vising for itself. They walked on into the open country, and 
Avhat with the discipline of the rector’s presence, the sobering 
effect wu’ouglit by the shock to pride and habit, and the un¬ 
wonted brain exercise of the conversation, the demon in Hens¬ 
lowe had been for the moment most strangely tamed after half 
an hour’s talk. Actually some reminiscence of his old wa3^s 
of speech and thought, the ways of the once prosperous and 
self-reliant man of business, had reappeared in him before the 
end of it, called out b}^ the subtle influence of a manner which 
alwa^^s attracted to the surface whatever decent element there 
might be left in a man, and then instantly gave it a recognition 
wdiich was more redeeming than either counsel or denunciation. 

By the time they parted Robert had arranged with his old 
enemy that he should become his surety witli a rich cousin in 
Churton, who, alwaj^s supposing there was no risk in the 
matter, and that benevolence ran on all-fours with security of 
investment, was prepared to shield the credit of the family by 
the advance of a sufficient sum of money to rescue the ex-agent 
from the most pressing difficulties. He had also wrung from 
him the promise to see a specialist in London—Robert writing 
that evening to make the appointment. 

How had it been done ? Xeither Robert nor Henslowe ever 
quite knew. Henslowe walked home in a bewilderment which 
for once had nothing to do with brand}", but was simply the 
result of a moral shock acting on what was still human in the 
man’s debased consciousness, just as electricity acts on the 
bodily frame. 

Robert, on the other hand, saw him depart with a singular 
lightening of mood. What lie seemed to have achieved might 
turn out to be the merest moonshine. At any rate, the inci¬ 
dent had appeased in him a kind of spiritual hunger—the 
hunger to escape awhile from that incessant jirocess of de¬ 
structive anal^^sis with which the mind was still beset, into 
some use of energv, more positive, human, and beneficent. 

The following da}^ was one long trial of endurance for Els- 


416 


IWBERT ELSMERE. 


mere and for Catherine. Slie pleaded to go, promising quietly 
to keep out of his sight, and they started together—a misera¬ 
ble pair. 

Crowds, heat, decorations, the grandees on the platform, 
and conspicuous among them the squire’s slouching frame and 
striking, head, side by side with a white and radiant Lady 
Helen—the outer success, the inner revolt and pain—■and the 
constant seeking of his truant eyes for a face that hid itself 
as much as possible in dark corners, but was in truth the one 
thing sharply pi-esent to him—these were the sort of impres¬ 
sions that remained with Elsmere afterward of this last meet¬ 
ing with his people. 

He had made a speech, of which he never could remember a 
word. As he sat down there had been a slight flutter of sur¬ 
prise in the sympathetic looks of those about him, as though 
the tone of it had been somewhat unexpected and dispropor¬ 
tionate to the occasion. Had he betrayed himself in any way? 
He looked for Catherine, but she was nowhere to be seen. 
Only in his search he caught the squire’s ironical glance, and 
wondered with quick shame what sort of nonsense he had been 
talking. 

Then a neighboring clergyman, wdio had been his warm sup¬ 
porter and admirer from the beginning, sprang up and made a 
rambling panegyric on him and on his work, which Elsmere 
wu-ithed under. His v/ork ! absurdity ! What could be done 
in two years? He saw it all as the merest nothing, a ragged 
beginning which might do more harm than good. 

But the cheering was incessant, the popular feeling intense. 
There’was old Milsoin weaving a feeble arm; John Allwood 
gaunt, but radiant; Mary iSJiarland, white still as the ribbons 
on her bonnet, egging on* her flushed and cheering husband ; 
and the club boys grinning and shouting, partH for love of 
Elsmere, most because to the young human animal mere noise 
is heaven. In front was an old hedger and ditcher, who came 
round the parish periodically, and never failed to take Els- 
mere’s opinion as to “a bit of prapperty” he and two other 
brothers as ancient as himself had been quarreling over for 
twenty years, and were likely to go on quarreling over till all 
three litigants had closed their e3"es on a mortal scene which 
had afforded them on the whole vast entertainment, though 
little pelf. Next him was a bowed and twisted old tramp, 
who had been shepherd in the district in hisj^outh, had then 
gone through the Crimea and the iMutiny, and was now living 
about the commons, welcome to feed here and sleep there for 
the sake of his stories and his queer, innocuous wit. Robert 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


417 


had had many a gay argumentative talk with him, and he and 
his companion had tramped miles to see the function, to rattle 
their sticks on the floor in Elsmere’s honor, and satiate their 
curious gaze on the squire. 

When all was over, Elsmere, with his wife on his arm, 
mounted tlie hill to the rectory, leaving the green behind them 
still crowded with folk. Once inside the shelter of their own 
trees, husband and wife turned instinctively and caught each 
other’s hands. A low groan broke from Elsmere’s lij)S ; Cath¬ 
erine looked at him one moment, then fell weeping on his 
breast. The first chapter of their common life was closed. 

One thing more, however, of a private nature, remained for 
Elsmere to do. Late in the afternoon he walked over to the 
Hall. 

He found the squire in the inner library, among his German 
books, his pipe in his mouth, his old smoking-coat and slippers 
bearing witness to the rapidity and joy with which he had 
shut the world out again after the futilities of the morning. 
His mood was more accessible than Elsmere had yet found it 
since his I'eturn. 

“ Well, have you done with all those tomfooleries, Elsmere ! 
Precious eloquent speech you made ? When I see you and 
people like you throwing yourselves at the heads of the 
people, I alwa3"s think of Scaliger’s remark about the Basques: 
‘ The}^ say the}^ understand one another —I clonH believe a 
word of it!'' All that the lower class wants to understand, 
at any rate, is the shortest way to the pockets of you and me; 
all that you and I need understand, according to me, is how 
to keep ’em off ! There 3"0u have the sum and substance of 
my political philosophy.” • 

“ You remind me,” said Robert dryljq sitting down on one 
of the library stools, “of some of those sentiments you 
expressed so forcibly on the first evening of our acquaint¬ 
ance.” 

Tlie squire received the shaft with equanimity. 

“ I was not amiable, I remember, on that occasion,” he said 
coolly, his thin, old man’s fingers moving the while among 
the shelves of books, “ nor on several subsequent ones. I had 
been made a fool of, and you were not particailarh^ adroit. 
But of course you won’t acknowledge it. AVho ever j^et got a 
parson to confess himself ! ” 

“ Strangely enough, Jlr. AYendover,” said Robert, fixing 
him with a })air of deliberate, feverish e^^es, “ I am here at this 
moment for that veiy purpose.” 

“ Go on,” said the squire, turning, however, to meet.the rec- 


418 


llOBERT ELSMERE. 


tor’s look, his gold s))ectacles falling forward over his long, 
hooked nose, his attitude one of sudden attention. “ Go on.” 

All liis grievances against Elsniere returned to him. lie 
stood aggressively waiting. 

Robert paused a moment, and then said abruptly : 

“Perhaps even you will agree, IVIr. Wendover, that I had 
some reason for sentiment this morning. Unless I read the 
lessons to-inori'ow, which is possible, to-day has been my last 
public appearance as rector of this parish ! ” 

The squii-e looked at him dumbfounded. 

“And your reasons?” he said, with quick imperativeness. 

Robert gave them. He admitted, as plainly and bluntly as 
he had done to Grey, the squire’s own part in the matter; but 
here a note of antagonism, almost of defiance, crept even into 
his confession of wide and illimitable defeat. lie was there, so 
to speak, to hand over his sword. But to the squire, his sur¬ 
render had all the pride of victoiy. 

“ AVhy should you give up your living?” asked the squire, 
after several minutes’ complete silence. 

He, too, had sat down, and was now bending forward, his 
sharp, small eyes peering at his companion. 

“ Simply because I prefer to feel myself an honest man. 
However, I have not acted without advice. Grey of St. An¬ 
selm’s—you know liim, of course—was a very close personal 
friend of mine at Oxford. I have been to see him, and we 
agreed it was the only thing to do.” 

“ Oh, Grey,” exclaimed the squire, with a movement of im¬ 
patience. “ Grey of course wanted you to set up a church of 
your own, or to join his ! He is like all idealists, he has the 
usual foolish contempt for 4he compromise of institutions.” 

“ Not at all,” said Robert calmly, “ you are mistaken ; he 
has the most sacred respect for institutions. He only thinks 
it well, and I agree with him, that with regard to a man’s 
])ublic profession and practice he should recognize that two 
and two make four.” 

It was clear to him from the squire’s tone and manner that 
Mr. AYendover’s instincts on the point were very much what 
he had expected, the instincts of the philosophical man of the 
world, who scorns the notion of taking popular belief serious¬ 
ly, whether for protest or fo?- sympathy. But he was too 
weaiy to argue. The s(pure, however, rose hastil}’^ and began 
to walk up and down in a gathering^tonn of irritation. The 
triumph gained for his own side, the tribute to his life’s 
work, were at the moment absolutely indifferent to him. 
They yere effaced by something else much harder to analvze. 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


419 


Wliatever it was, it drove him to tlirow himself into Robert’s 
position with a perverse, bewildering bitterness. 

“ AYhy should you break up your life in this wanton way ? 
Who, in God’s name, is injured if you keep your living ? It is 
the business of the thinker and the scholar to clear his mind of 
cobwebs. Granted. You liave done it. But it is also the 
business of the practical man to live. If I had your altruist, 
emotional temperament I should not hesitate for a moment. 
I should regard the historical expressions of an eternal ten¬ 
dency in men as wliolly indifferent to me. If I understand jmu 
aright, you have dung away the sanctions of orthodoxy. 
There is no other in the way. Treat words as they deserve. 

You ”—and the speaker laid an emphasis on the pronoun 
which for the life of him he could not help making sarcastic— 
“ you will always have Gospel enough to preach.” 

“ I can not,” Robert repeated, quietly, unmoved by the 
taunt, if it was one. “I am in a different stage, I imagine, 
from you. Words—that is to say, the specilic Christian 
formulae—may be indifferent to you, though a month or two 
ago I should hardly have guessed it ; they are just now any¬ 
thing but indifferent to me.” 

The squire’s brow grew darker. He took up the argument 
again, more pugnaciously than ever. It Avas the strangest 
attempt ever made to gibe and dout a wandering sheep back 
into the fold. Robert’s resentment Avas roused at last. The 
squire’s temper seemed to him totally inexplicable, his argu¬ 
ments contradictory, the con\^ersation useless and irritating. 
He got up to take his leaA'e. 

“ What you are about to do, Elsmere,”the squire Avound up 
Avith saturnine emphasis, “ is a piece of coioardice ! You will 
live bitterly to regret the haste and the unreason of it.” 

‘•There had been no haste,” exclaimed Robert, in the Ioav 
tone of passionate emotion ; “ I liave not rooted up the most 
sacred groAvths of life as a careless child devastates its garden. 
There are some things Avhich a man only does because he 
mustT 

There was a pause. Robert held out his hand. The squire 
would hardly touch it. Outwardly his mood was one of the 
strangest eccentricity and anger ; and as to what was beneath 
it, Elsmere’s quick divination Avas dulled b}^ Avorry and fatigue. 
It only served him so far that at the door he turned back, hat 
in hand, and said, looking lingeringly the Avhile at the solitary 
somber figure, at the great library, Avith all its suggestive and 
exquisite detail : “ If Monday is fine, squire, will you Avalk?” 

Idle squire made no reply except by another question. 


420 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


“Do YOU still keep to your Swiss plans for next week?” 
he asked sharply. 

“ Certainly, The plan, as it happens, is a godsend. But 
there,” said Robert, with a sigh, “ let me explain the details 
of this dismal business to 3^11 on Monday. I have hardly the 
courage for it now.” 

The curtain dropped behind him. Mr. Wendover stood a 
minute looking after him ; then, with some vehement expletive 
or other, Avalked up to his writing-table, drew some folios that 
were lying on it toward him, with hasty maladroit movements 
which sent his papers fl3dng over the floor, and plunged dog¬ 
gedly into work. 

He and Mrs. Darcy dined alone. After dinner the squire 
leaned against the mantel-piece sipping his coffee, more gloom¬ 
ily silent than even his sister had seen him for Aveeks. And, as 
alwa3's happened when he became more difficult and morose, 
she became more childish. She was now whollj^ absorbed with 
a little electric to}^ she had just bought for Maiy Elsmere, a 
number of infinitesimal little figures dancing fantastically 
under the stimulus of an electric current, generated b3^ the 
simplest means. She hung over it absorbed, calling to her 
brother every now and then, as though by sheer perversity, to 
come and look whenever the pink or the blue danseiise exe¬ 
cuted a more surprising somersault than usual. 

He took not the smallest spoken notice of her, though 
his eA^es followed her contemptuously as she moved from 
windoAV to AvindoAV Avith her to}^ in pursuit of the fading 
light. 

“ Oh, Roger,” she called presently, still throAving herself to 
this side and that, to catch new views of her pith puppets, “ I 
have got something to shoAV 3mu. You must admire them— 
you shall ! I have been draAving them all da}', and the}^ are 
nearly done. You remember Avhat I told Amu once about my 
‘ imps ’ ? I have seen them all 1113^ life, since I was a child in 
France Avith papa, and I have never been able to draAV them 
till the last few Aveeks. They are such dears—such darlings ; 
every one Avill knoAv them Avhen he sees them ! There is the 
Chinese imp, the Ioav smirking creature, 3mu knoAv, that sits 
on the edge of your cup of tea ; there is the fiippertx^-flopperty 
creature that flies out at 3^11 Avhen 3^11 open a draAver ; there is 
the tAvist3^-tAvirl3' person that sits jeei'ing on the edge of your 
hat Avhen it bloAvs aAvaA^ from you ; and ”—her voice dropped— 
“that?i(7^y, ugly thing T ahvays see Avaiting for me on the top 
of a gate. Tlwy liave teased me all my life, and uoav at last I 


ROBElir ELSMERE. 


421 


have drawn them. If tliey were to take offense to-morrow I 
should have them—the beauties—all safe.” ^ 

She came toward him, her bizarre little figure swaying from 
side to side, her eyes glittering, her restless hands pulling at 
the lace round her blanched head and face. The squire, his 
hands behind him, k»oking at her frowning, an involuntarily 
horror dawning on his dark countenance, turned abruptly, 
and left the room. 

Mr. AVendover worked till midnight; then, tired out, he 
turned to the bit of fire to which, in spite of the oppressiveness 
of the weather, the chilliness of age and nervous strain had led 
him to set alight. He sat there for long, sunk in the blackest 
reverie. He was the only living creature in the great library 
wing which spread around and above him—the only waking 
creature in the whole vast pile of Mure well. The silver lamps 
shone with a steady melancholy light on the checkered walls 
of books. The silence was a silence that could be felt; and the 
gleaming Artemis, the tortured frowning Medusa, were hardly 
stiller in their frozen calm than the crouching figure of the squire. 

So Elsmere was going ! In a few weeks the rectoiy would by 
once more tenanted by one of those nonentities the squire had 
either patronized or scorned all his life. The park, the lanes, 
the room in which he sits, will know that spare young figure, 
that animated voice, no more. The outlet which had brought 
so much relief and stimulus to his own mental powers is closed : 
the friendship on w 4 dch he had unconsciously come to depend 
so much is broken before it has well begun. 

All sorts of strange thwarted instincts make themselves felt 
in the squire. The wife he had once thought to marry, the 
children he might have had, come to sit like ghosts with him 
beside the fii’e. He had never, like Augustine, “loved to love 
he had only loved to know. But none of us escapes to the last 
the yearnings which make ns men. The squire becomes con¬ 
scious that certain fibers he had thought long since dead in him 
had been all the while twining themselves silently round the 
disciple who had shown him in many respects such a filial con¬ 
sideration and confidence. That young man might have be¬ 
come to him the son of hi^old age, the one human being from 
whom, as weakness of mind and body break him down, even 
his indomitable spirit might have accepted the sweetness of 
human pity, the comfort of human helj). 

And it is his own hand which has done most to break the 
nascent, slowly forming tie. He has bereft himself. 

AA^ith what incredible recklessness had he been acting all 
these months ! 


422 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


It was the levity of liis own proceeding whicli stared him in 
the face. His rough hand had closed on the delicate wings of 
a soul as a hoy crushes the butterfly he pursues. As Elsmere 
had stood looking back at him from the library door, the suffer¬ 
ing which spoke in every line of that changed face had stirred 
a sudden troubled remorse in Roger Wen(it>vei-. It was mere 
justice than one result of that suffering should be to leave 
himself forlorn. 

He had been thinking and writing of religion, of the history' 
of ideas, all his life. Had he ever grasped the meaning of 
religion to the religious man f God and faith —what have 
these venerable ideas ever mattered to him personally, except 
as the subjects of the most ingenious analysis, the most deli¬ 
cate historical inductions ? Not only skeptical to the core, but 
constitutionally indifferent, the squire had always found 
enough to make life amply worth living in the mere dissection 
of other men’s beliefs. 

But to-night! The unexpected shock of feeling, mingled 
with the terrible sense, periodically alive in him, of physical 
doom, seems to have stripped from the thornj^ soul its outer de¬ 
fenses of mental habit. He sees once more the hideous spectacle 
of his father’s death, his own black, half-remembered moments 
of warning, the teasing horror of his sister’s increasing weak¬ 
ness of brain. Life has been on the whole a burden, though 
there has been a certain joy no doubt in the fierce intellectual 
struggle of it. And to-night it seems so nearly over ! A cold 
prescience of death creeps over the squire as he sits in the 
lamplighted silence. His eye seems to be actually penetrating 
the eternal vastness which lies about our life. He feels him¬ 
self old, feeble, alone. The awe, the terror which are at 
the root of all religions have fallen even upon him at last. 

The fire burns lower, the night wears on ; outside, an airless, 
misty moonlight lies over park and field. Hark ! was that 
a sound upstairs, in one of those silent, empty rooms ? 

The squire half rises, one hand on his chair, his blanched 
face strained, listening. Again ! Is it a footstep or simply a 
delusion of the ear ? He rises, pushes aside the curtains into 
the inner libraiy, where the lamps have almost burned away, 
creeps up the wooden stair, and fnto the deserted upper 
story. 

Why was that door into the end room—his father’s room— 
open? He had seen it closed that afternoon. No one had 
been there since. He stepped nearer. Was that simpl}^ a 
gleam of moonlight on the polished floor—confused lines of 
shadow thrown b}^ the vine outside ? And was that sound noth- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


423 


ing but the stirring of the rising wind of dawn against the 
open casement window ? Or: 

“3/y God!^^ 

The squire ded down stairs. He gained his chair again. He 
sat upright an instant, impressing on himself, with sardonic, 
vindictive force, some of the truisms as to tlie action of mind 
on body, of brain-process on sensation, whicli it had been part 
of his life’s work to illustrate. The philosopher had time to 
realize a shuddering fellowship of weakness with his kind, to 
see himself as a helpless instance of an inexorable law, before 
he fell back in his chair ; a swoon, born of pitiful human terror 
—terror of things unseen—creeping over heart and brain. 


BOOK V.— ROSE. 

CHAPTER XXXI. 

It was a November afternoon. London lay wrapped in 
rainy fog. The atmosphere was such as only a Londoner can 
breathe with equanimit}'', and the gloom was indescribable. 

Meanwhile, in defiance of the inferno outside, festal prepara¬ 
tions were being made in a little house on Campden Hill. Lamps 
were lighted; in the drawing-room chairs were pushed back; the 
piano was open, and a violin stand towered beside it ; chrysan¬ 
themums were everywhere ; an invalid lady in a “ best cap ” oc¬ 
cupied the sofa; and two girls were flitting about, clearly mak¬ 
ing the last arrangements necessary for a “musical afternoon.” 

The invalid was jVIrs. Leyburn, tlie girls, of course. Rose and 
Agnes. Rose at last was safely settled in her longed-for Lon¬ 
don, and an artistic company, of the sort her soul loved, was 
coming to tea with her. 

Of Rose’s summer at Burwood very little need be said. She 
was conscious that she had not borne it very well. She had 
been off-hand with Mrs. Thornburgh, and had enjoyed one or 
two open skirmishes with IVIrs. Seaton. Her whole temper had 
been irritating and irritable—she was perfectly aware of it. 
Toward her sick mother, indeed, she had controlled herself ; 
not for such a restless creature, had she made a bad nurse. 
But Agnes had endured much, and found it all the harder be¬ 
cause she was so totally in the dark as to the whys and where- 
foi’es of her sister’s moods. 

Rose herself would have scornfully denied that any whj^s 
and wherefores—bej^ond her rooted dislike of Whindale—exis¬ 
ted. Since l^er return from Berlin, and especially since that 



424 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


moment when, as she was certain, Mr. Langliam bad avoided 
her and Catherine at the National Gallery, she had been 
calmly certain of her own heart-wholeness. Berlin had devel¬ 
oped her precisely as she had desired that it might. The ne¬ 
cessities of the Bohemian student’s life had trained her to a 
new independence and shrewdness, and in her own o})inion slie 
was now a woman of the world judging all things by pure 
reason. 

Oh, of course she understood him perfectly. In the first 
])lace, at the time of their first meeting she had been a mere 
bread-and-butter miss, the easiest of preys for any one who 
might wish to get few hours’ amusement and distraction out 
of her temper and caprices. In the next place, even supposing 
he had been ever inclined to fall in love with her, which her 
new sardonic fairness of mind obliged her to regard as entirely 
doubtful, he was a man to whom marriage was impossible. 
How could any one expect such a superfine dreamer to turn 
bread-winner fer a .wife and household ? Imagine Mr. Lang- 
hani interviewed by a rate-collector, or troubled about coals ! 
As to her—simply she had misunderstood the laws of the 
game. It was a little bitter to have to confess it ; a little bit¬ 
ter that he should have seen it, and have felt reluctantly com¬ 
pelled to recall the facts to her. But, after all, most girls have 
some 3"oung follies to blush over. 

So far the little cynic would get, becoming rather more 
scarlet, however, over the process of reflection than was quite 
compatible with the ostentatious worldly wisdom of it. Then 
a sudden inward restlessness would break through, and she 
would spend a passionate hour pacing up and down, and hun¬ 
gering for the moment when she miglit avenge upon herself 
and him the week of silly friendshij) he had found it necessary 
as her elder and monitor to cut short ! 

In September came the news of Robert’s resignation of his 
living. jMother and daughters sat looking at each other over 
the letter, stupified. That this calamity, of all others, should 
have fallen on Catherine, of all women ! Rose said very little, 
and presently jumped up with shining, excited eyes, aiid ran 
out for a walk with Bob, leaving Agnes to console their tear¬ 
ful and agitated mother. When she came in she went singing 
about the house as usual. Agnes, who was moved bv the 
news' out of all her ordinary sangfroid, was outraged byVhat 
seemed to her Rose’s callousness. Ehe wrote a letter to Cath¬ 
erine, which Catherine ]mt among her treasures, so strangely 
unlike it was to the quiet, indiffei'ent Agnes of every day. 
Rose spent a morning over an attempt at a letter, which when 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


425 


it readied its destination only wounded Catherine hy its cohi- 
straint and convention. 

And yet that same night when tlie child was alone, suddenly 
some phrase of Catherine’s letter i-ecurred to her. She saw^ as 
only imaginative ])eople see, with every detail visualized, her 
sister’s sulfering, her sister’s struggle that was to be. She 
jumped into bed, and, stifling all sounds under the clothes, cried 
herself to sleep, which did not prevent her the next morning 
from harboring somewhere at the bottom of lier a wicked and 
furtive satisfaction^that Catherine might now learn there were 
more opinions in the world than one. 

As for the rest of the valley, Mrs. Leyburn soon passed 
from bewailing to a })laintive indignation with Robert, which 
was a relief to her daughters. It seemed to her a reflection on 
‘‘ Richard ” that Robert should have behaved so. Cluirch 
opinions had been good enough for “ Richard.” “ The young 
men seem to think, my dears, their fathers were all fools ! ” 

The vicar, good man, was sincerely distressed, but sincerely 
confident, also, that in time Elsmere would find his way back 
into the fold. In Mrs. Thornburgh’s dismay there was a se¬ 
cret superstitious pang. Peibaps she had better not have 
meddled. Perhaps it was never well to meddle. One event 
bears many readings, and the tragedy of Catherine Elsmere’s 
life took shape in the uneasy consciousness of the vicar’s 
spouse as a more or less sharp admonition against willfulness 
in match-making. 

Of course. Rose had her way as to wintering in London. 
They came up in the middle of October while the Elsmeres 
were still abroad, and settled into a small house in Lerwick 
Gardens, Campden Hill, which Catherine had secured for 
them on her wa}^ through town to the Continent. 

As soon as Mrs. Leyburn had been made comfortable. Rose 
set to work to look up her friends. Sne owed her acquaint¬ 
ance in London hitherto mainly to Mr. and Mrs. Pierson, the 
young barrister and his aesthetic wife whom she had originall}'' 
met and made friends with in a railway-carriage. Mr. Pierson 
was bustling and shrewd ; not made of the finest clay, yet not 
at all a bad fellow. Ilis wife, the daughter of a famous Mrs. 
Leo Hunter of a by-gone generation, Avas small, untidjq and 
in all matters of religious or political opinion “emancipated ” 
to an extreme. She liad also a strong vein of inherited social 
ambition, and she and her husband welcomed Rose with 
greater effusion than ever, in proportion as she was more 
beautiful and more indisputably gifted than ever. They 
placed themselves and their house at the girl’s service, partly 


426 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


out of genuine admiration and good nature, partly also because 
they divined in lier a profitable social appendage. 

For the Piersons, social^, were still climbing, and had by no 
means attained. Their world, so fai*, consisted too much of 
the odds and ends of most other worlds. They were not satis¬ 
fied with it, and the friendship of the girl-violinist, whose viva¬ 
cious-beauty and artistic gift made a stir wherever she went, 
was a very welcome addition to their resources. They feted 
her in their own house ; they took her to the houses of other 
people ; society smiled on Miss Leyburn’s protectors more than 
it had ever smiled on Mr. and Mrs. Pierson taken alone ; and 
meanwhile Rose, flushed, excited, and totally unsuspicious, 
thought the world a fairy tale, and lived from morning till 
night in a perpetual din of music, compliments, and bravos, 
which seemed to her life indeed—life at last! 

With the beginning of November the Elsmeres returned, 
and about the same time Rose began to project tea-parties of 
her own, to which Mrs. Leyburn gave a flurried assent. When 
the invitations were 'written, Rose sat staring at them a little, 
pen in hand. 

“ I wonder what Catherine will say to some of these peo¬ 
ple ? ” she remarked in a dubious voice to Agnes. “ Some of 
them are queer, I admit; but, after all, those two superior 
persons will have to get used to my friends some time, and 
they may as well begin.” 

“You can not expect poor Cathie to come,” said Agnes with 
sudden energy. 

Rose’s eyebrows went up. Agnes resented her ironical ex¬ 
pression, and with a word or two of quite unusual sharpness 
got up and went. 

Rose, left alone, sprang up suddenljq and clasped her white 
Angers above her head, with a long breath. 

“ Where my heart used to be there is now just—a black— 
cold—cinder,” she remarked with sarcastic emphasis. “ 1 am 
sure I used to be a nice girl once, but it is so long ago I can’t 
remember it ! ” 

She stayed so a minute or more ; then two tears suddenly 
broke and fell. She dashed them angrily away, and sat down 
again to her note-writing. 

Among the cards she had'still to fill up was one of which the 
envelope was addressed to the Hon. Hugh Flaxman, 90 St. 
James’s Place. Lady Charlotte, though she had afterward 
again left town, had been in Martin Street at the end of Octo¬ 
ber. The Leyburns had lunched there, and had been intro¬ 
duced by her to her nephew and I^ady Helen’s brother, Mr. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


427 


Flaxnian. The girls had found him agreeable ; he had called 
the week afterward when tliey were not at home ; and Rose 
now carelessly sent him a card, with the inward reflection that 
he was much too great a man to come, and was probably en¬ 
joying himself at country houses, as every aristocrat should, 
in November. 

The following day the two girls made their way over to Bed¬ 
ford Square, where the Elsmeres had taken a house in order to 
be near the British Museum. They pushed their way upstairs 
through a medley of packing-cases and a sickening smell ol. 
paint. There was a sound of an opening door, and a gentle¬ 
man stepped out of the .back room, which was to be Elsmere’s 
study, on to the landing. 

It was Edward Langham. He and Rose stood and stared at 
each other a moment. Then Rose in the coolest, lightest voice 
introduced him to Agnes. Agnes, with one curious glance, 
took in her sister’s defiant, smiling ease and the stranger’s em¬ 
barrassment ; then she went on to find Catherine. The two 
left behind exchanged a few banal questions and answers. 
Langham had only allowed himself one* look at the dazzling 
face and eyes framed in fur cap and boa. Afterward he stood 
making a study of the ground, and answering her remarks in 
his usual stumbling fashion. What was it had gone out of her 
voice—simply the soft, callow sounds of first youth ? And 
what a personage she had grown in these twelve months—how 
formidably, conspicuously brilliant in look and dress and 
manner ! 

Yes, he was still in town—settled there, indeed, for some 
time. And she—was there any special day on which Mrs. 
Leyburn received visitors ? He asked the question, of course, 
with various hesitations and circumlocutions. 

“ Oh, dear, yes ! Will you come next Wednesday, for in¬ 
stance, and inspect a musical menagerie? The animals will 
go through their performances from four till seven. And 
can answer for it that some of the specimens will be entirely 
new to you.” 

The prospect offered could hardly have been more repellent 
to him, but he got out an acceptaiice somehow. She nodded 
lightly to him and passed on, and he went downstairs, his 
head in a whirl. Where had the crude pretty child of yester¬ 
year departed to—impulsive, conceited, readil}^ offended, easily 
touched, sensitive as to what all the world might think of her 
and her performances ? The girl he had just left had counted 
all her resources, tried the edge of all her weapons, and knew 
her own place too well to ask for anybody else’s appraisement, 


428 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


What beauty—good heavens !—what aploynh ! The rich hus¬ 
band Elsmere talked of would hardly take much waiting for. 

So cogitating, Langham took his way westward to his Beau¬ 
mont Street rooms. They were on the second-floor, small, din¬ 
gy, choked with books. Ordinarily he shut the door behind liim 
winh a sign of content. This evening they seemed to him in¬ 
tolerably confined and stuffy. He thought of going out to his 
club and a concert, but did nothing, after all, but sit brooding 
over the fire till midnight, alternately hugging and hating his 
solitude. 

And so we return to the Wednesday following this unex¬ 
pected meeting. 

The drawing-room at Ho 27 was beginning to fill. Rose 
stood at the door receiving the guests as they flowed in, while 
Agnes in the background dispensed tea. She was discuss¬ 
ing with herself the probability of Langham’s appearance. 
“ Whom shall I introduce him to first ? ” she pondered, while 
she shook hands. “ The poet? I see mamma is now struggling 
with him. The ’cellist with the hair—or the lady in Greek 
dress—or the esoteric Buddhist ? What a fascinating selection ! 
I had really no notion we should be quite so curious ! ” 

“ Mees Rose, they vait for you,” said a charming golden- 
bearded young German, viola in hand, bowing before her. He 
and his kind were most of them in love with her already, and 
all the more so because she knew so well how to keep them at 
a distance. 

She went off, beckoning to Agnes to take her place, and the 
quartet began. The young German aforesaid played the viola, 
while the ’cello was divinely played by a Hungarian, of whose 
outer man it need only be said that in wild profusion of much- 
tortured hair, in Hebraism of feature, and swarthy smoothness 
of cheek, he belonged to that type which Nature would seem to 
have alread}^ used to excess in the production of the continental 
musician. Rose herself was violinist, and the instruments 
dashed into the opening allegro with a precision and an entram 
that took the room by storm. 

In the middle of it, Langham pushed his way into the crowd 
round the di-awing-roorn door. Through the heads about him, 
he could see lier standing a little in advance of the others, her 
head turned to one side, really in the natural attitude of violin¬ 
playing, but, as it seemed to him, in a kind of ravishment of 
listening—cheeks flushed, e3^es shining, and the right arm and 
high-curved wrist managing the bow with a grace born of 
knowledge and fine training. 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


429 


Very much improved, eh ? ” said an English professional to 
a German neighbor, lifting his eyebrows interrogatively. 

The other nodded with the business-like air of one Avho 
knows. “ Joachim, they say, war darilber eatzuckt, and did 
his best vid her, and now D— has got her”—naming a fa¬ 
mous violinist—” she vill make fast brogress. He vill schtamp 
upon her treecks ! ” 

“ But will she ever be more than a very clever amateur? 
Too pretty, eh ? ” And the questioner nudged his companion, 
dropping his voice. 

Langham would have given worlds to get on into the room, 
over the prostrate body of the speaker by preference, but the 
laws of mass and weight had him at their mercy, and he was 
rooted to the spot. 

The other shrugged his shoulders. “ Veil, vid a bretty woman 
— ilberhaupt —it dosiiH mean business ! It’s zoziety—the dukes 
and the duchesses—that ruins all the young talents.” 

This Avhispered conversation went on during the andante. 
With the scherzo the two hirsute faces broke into broad smiles. 
The artist behind each woke u]), and Langham heard no more, 
except gutteral sounds of delight and quick notes of technical 
cnticism. 

How that scherzo danced and coquetted, and how the presto 
fleAV as though all the Avinds were behind it, chasing its mad 
eddies of notes through listening space ! At the end, amid a 
wild storm of applause, she laid doAvn her violin, and, proudly 
smiling, her breast still heaving with excitement and exertion, 
received the praises of those crowding round her. The group 
round the door was precipitated forward, and Langham with 
it. She saw him in a moment. Her white brow contracted, 
and €he gave him a quick but hardly smiling glance of recog¬ 
nition through the crowd. He thought there was no chance of 
getting at her, and moved aside amid the general hubbub to 
look at a picture. 

“ Mr. Langham, hoAV do you do ? ” 

He turned sharpl}^ and found her beside him. She had come 
to him Avith malice in her heart—malice born of smart and long- 
smoldering pain ; but as she caught his look, the look of the 
nervous, short-sighted scholar and recluse, as her glance swept 
over the delicate refinement of the face, a sudden softness 
quivered in her own. The game Avas so defenseless ! 

“ You Avill find nobody here you knoAV,” she said abruptly, 
a little under her breath. “ I am morally certain you never saw 
a single person in the room before ! Shall I introduce you ? ” 
“Delighted, of course. But don’t disturb yourself about 


430 


BOBERT ELSMERE. 


me, Miss Leyburn. I come out of my hole so seldom, every¬ 
thing amuses me—but especially looking and listening.” 

“ Which means,” she said, with frank audacity, ‘‘ that you 
dislike new people ! ” 

His eye kindled at once. ‘‘ Say rather that it means a pref¬ 
erence for the people that are not new ! There is such a thing 
as concentrating one’s attention. I came to hear you play, 
Miss Leyburn ! ” 

“Weil?” 

She glanced at him from under her long lashes, one hand 
playing with the rings on the other. He thought, suddenh^, 
with a sting of regret, of the confiding child who had flushed 
under his praise that Sunday evening at Murewell. 

“ Superb ! ” he said, but half mechanically. “ I had no 
notion a winter’s work would have done so much for you. 
Was Berlin as stimulating as you expected? When*I heard 
pou had gone, I said to myself : ‘ Well, at least, now, there is 
one completely happy person in Europe ! ’ ” 

“ Did you ? How easily we all dogmatize about each 
other?” she said scornfully. Her manner was by no means 
simple. He did not feel himself at all at ease with her. His 
very embarrassment, however, drove him into rashness, as 
often happens. 

“ I thought I had enough to go upon ! ” he said in another 
tone ; and his black eyes, sparkling as though a film had 
dropped from them, supplied the reference his words forbore. 

She turned away from him with a perceptible drawing up 
of the whole figure. 

“ Will you come and be introduced ? ” she asked him, coldly. 
He bowed as coldly and followed her. Wholesome resent¬ 
ment of her manner was denied him. He had asked for her 
friendship, and had then gone away and forgotten her. 
Clearly what she meant him to see now was that they were 
strangers again. Well, she was amply in her right. He sus¬ 
pected that his allusion to their first talk over the fire had not 
been unwelcome to her, as an opportunit}^ 

And he had actually debated whether he should come, lest 
in spite of himself she might beguile him once more into those 
old lapses of will and common sense ! Coxcomb ! 

He made a few spasmodic efforts at conv(u-sation with the 
lady to whom she had introduced him, then awkwardlv disen¬ 
gaged himself and went to stand in a corner and study his 
neighbors. 

Close to him, he founrl, was the poet of the party, got up in 
the most correct professional costume—long hair, velvet coat, 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


431 


eyeglass and all. His extravagance, however, was of the most 
conventional type. Only his vanity had a touch of the sub¬ 
lime. Langham, wdio possessed a sort of fine-ear gift for 
catching conversation, heard him saying to an open-eyed 
ingenue beside him : 

“ Oh, my literary baggage is small as yet. I have only 
done, perhaps, three things that will live.” 

“ Oh, Mr. Wood ! ” said the maiden, mildly protesting 
against so much modesty. 

He smiled, thrusting his hand into the breast of the velvet 
coat. “But, then,” he said, in a tone of the purest candor, 
“ at my age I don’t think Shelley had done more ! ” 

Langham, who, like all shy men, was liable to occasional 
explosions, was seized with a convulsive fit of coughing, and 
had to retire from the neighborhood of the bard, who looked 
round him, disturbed and slightly frowning. 

At last he discovered a point of view in the back room 
whence he could watch the humors of the crowd without com¬ 
ing too closely in contact with them. What a miscellaneous 
collection it v^as ! He began to be irritably jealous for Rose’s 
place in the world. She ought to be more ade(iuately sur¬ 
rounded than this. What was Mrs. Leyburn—what were the 
Elsmeres about ? He rebelled against the thought of her liv¬ 
ing perpetually among her inferiors, the center ,of a vulgar 
publicity, queen of the second rate. 

It provoked him that she should be amusing herself so well. 
Her laughter, every now and then, came ringing into the back 
room. And presently there was a general hubbub. Langham 
craned his neck forward, and saw a struggle going on over a 
roll of music, between Rose and the long-haired, long-nosed 
violoncellist. Evidently she did not want to play some par¬ 
ticular piece, and wished to put it out of siglit. Whereupon 
the Hungarian, who had been clamoring for it, rushed to its 
rescue, and there was a mock fight over it. At last, amid the 
applause of the room. Rose was beaten, and her conqueror, 
flourishing the music on high, executed a kind of pas seul of 
triumph. 

“ Victoria !he QYiedi. “Now denn for de conditions of 
peace. Mees Rose, vill you kindly tune up ? You are as modi 
beaten as the French at Sedan.” 

“ Not a stone of my fortresses, notan inch of my territory! ” 
said Rose, with fine emphasis, crossing her white wrists be¬ 
fore her. 

The Hungarian looked at her, the wild, poetic strain in him 
which ’\vas tlie strain of race reasserting itself. 


432 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


“ But if de victor bows,” he said, di'opping on one knee 
before lier. “ If force lay down his spoils at de feet of 
beauty ? ” 

The circle round them applauded hoth", the touch of the¬ 
atricality finding immediate I’esponse. Langham was remorse¬ 
lessly conscious of the man’s absurd chevelure ill-fitting 
clothes. But Rose herself had evidently nothing but relish for 
the scene. Proudly smiling, she held out her hand for her 
pro])ert3^, and as soon as she had it safe, she whisked it into the 
open drawer of a cabinet standing near, and drawing out the 
key, held it up a moment in her taper fingers, and then, de¬ 
positing it in a little velvet bag hanging at her girdle, slie 
closed the snap upon it with a little vindictive wave of trium{)h. 
Every movement was graceful, rapid, effective. 

Half a dozen German throats broke into guttural protest. 
Amid the storm of laughter and remonstrance, tlie door sud¬ 
denly opened. The fluttered parlor-maid mumbled a long 
name, and, with a port of soldierly uprightness, there advanced 
behind her a a large, fair-haired woman, followed by a gentle¬ 
man, and in the distance b}^ another figure. 

Rose drew back a moment, astounded, one hand on the 
piano, her dress sweeping round her. An awkward silence fell 
on the chattering circle of musicians. 

“ Good heavens,” said Langham to himself, “ Lady Char¬ 
lotte Wynnstay ! ” 

“ How do you do. Miss Leyburn ? ” < said one of the most 
piercing of voices. “Are you sur})rised to see me? You didn’t 
ask me-^—perhaps you don’t want me. But I have come, you 
see, partly because my nephew was coming,” and she pointed 
to the gentlemen behind her, “ partly because I meant to pun¬ 
ish you for not having come to see me last Thursday. Why 
didn’t you ? ” 

“ Because we thought jmu were still away,” said Rose, who 
had by this time recovered her self-possession. “ But if you 
meant to punish me. Lady Charlotte, you have done it badly. 
I am delighted to see you. May I introduce my sister. Agnes, 
will you find Lady Charlotte Wjmnstay a chair by mamma ?” 

“ Oh, you wish, I see, to dispose of me at once,” said the 
other imperturbably. “ What is happening ? Is it music ? ” 

“ Aunt Cliarlotte, that is most disingenuous on your part. 
I gave you ample warning.” 

Rose turned a smiling face toward the speaker. It was Mr. 
Flaxman, Lady Charlotte’s companion. 

“ You need not have drawn the picture too black, Mr. Flax- 
man. There is an escape. If Lady Charlotte will only let my 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


433 


sister take her into tlie next room, she will findlierself well out 
of the clutches of the music. Oli, Robert ! Here you are at 
last! Lady Charlotte, you remember my bi*other-in-law ? 
Robert, will you get Lady Charlotte some tea ? ” 

“ I am not going to be banished,” said Mr. Flaxman, look¬ 
ing down upon her, his well-bred, slightly worn face aglow 
with animation and pleasure. 

“ Tlien you will be deafened,” said Rose, laughing, as she 
escaped from him a moment, to arrange for a song from a tall, 
formidable maiden, built after the fashion of Mr. Gilbert’s 
contralto heroines, with a voice which bore out the ample 
promise of her frame. 

Your sister is a terribly self-possessed young person, Mr. 
Elsmere,” said Lady Charlotte, as Robert piloted her across 
the room. 

“ Does that imply praise or blame on your part. Lady Char¬ 
lotte ? ” asked Robert, smiling. 

“ Neither at present. I don’t know Miss Leyburn well 
enough. I merely state a fact. No tea, Mr. Elsmere. I have 
had three teas already, and I am not like the American woman 
who could always worry down another cup.” 

She was introduced to Mrs. Leyburn ; but the plaintive in¬ 
valid was immediately seized with terror of her voice and ap¬ 
pearance, and was infinitely grateful to Robert for removing 
her as promptly as possible to a chair on the border of the two 
rooms where she could talk or listen as she pleased. For a 
few moments she listened to Fraulein Adelmann’s veiled, un¬ 
manageable contralto ; then she turned magisterially to Robert 
standing behind her. 

“The art of singing has gone out,” slie declared, “since 
.the Germans have been allowed to meddle in it. By the way, 
Mr. Elsmere, how do you manage to be here ? Are you tak¬ 
ing a holiday ? ” 

Robert looked at her with a start. 

“ I have left Mure well. Lady Charlotte.” 

“ Left Murewell ! ” she said, in astonishment, turning round 
to look at him, her eyeglass in her eye. “ Why has 
Helen told me nothing about it ! Have you got another 
living ? ” 

“No. My wife and I are settling in London. We only 
told Lady Helen of our intentions a few weeks ago.” 

To which it may be added that Lady Helen, touched and 
dismayed by Elsmere’s letter to her, had not been very eager 
to hand over the woes of her friends to her aunt’s cool and 
irresponsible comments. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


AVA 


Lady Charlotte deliberately looked at him a minute longet 
through her glass. Then she let it fall. 

“You don’t mean to tell me any more, I can see, Mr. Els- 
mere. But you will allow me to be astonished ? ” 

“ Certainly,” he said, smiling sadly, and immediately after¬ 
ward relapsing into silence. 

“ Harv e you heard of the squire lately ? ” he asked her, after 
a pause. 

“Not from him. We are excellent friends when we meet, 
but he doesn’t consider me worth writing to. His sister— 
little idiot—writes to me every now and then. But she has 
not vouchsafed me a letter since the summer. I should say 
from the last accounts that he was breaking.” 

“He had a mysterious attack of illness just before I left,” 
said Robert, gravely. “ It made one anxious.”. 

“Oh, it is the old stoiy. All the Wendovers have died of 
weak hearts or queer l)rains—generally of both together. I 
imagine you had some experience of the squire’s queerness at 
one time, Mr. Elsmere. I can’t say you and he seemed to be 
on particularly good terms on the only occasion I ever had 
the pleasure of meeting you at Murewell.” 

She looked up at him, smiling grimly. She had a curiously 
exact memoiy for the unpleasant scenes of life. 

“ Oh, you remember that unlucky evening ! ” said Robert, 
reddening a little. “ We soon got over that. We became 
great friends.” 

Again, however. Lady Charlotte was struck by the quiet 
melanchCly of his tone. How strangely the look of youth— 
Avhich had been so attractive in him the year before—had 
ebbed from the man’s face—from complexion, eyes, expression! 
She stared at him, full of a brusque, tormenting curiosity as 
to the how and why. 

“ I hope there is some one among jmu strong enough to man¬ 
age Miss Rose,” she said, presently, with an abrupt change of 
subject. “ That little sister-in-law of yours is going to be the 
rage.” 

“ Heaven forbid ! ” cried Robert, fervently. 

“ Heaven will do nothing of the kind. She is twice as pretty 
as she was last year ; I am told she plays twice as well. She 
liad always the sort of manner that })rovoked ])eople one mo¬ 
ment and charmed them the next. And, to judge by my few 
words with her just now, I should say she had developed it 
hnelv. Well, now, Mr. Elsmere, who is going to take care 
of her ? ” 

“ I suppose we shall all have a try at it, Lady Charlotte,” 


nOBERT ELSMERE. 


435 


“ Her mother doesn’t look to me a person of nerve enougli,” 
said Lady Charlotte coolly. “ She is a girl certain—absolute¬ 
ly certain—to have adventures, and you may as well be pre¬ 
pared for them.” 

“ I can only trust she will disappoint 3’our expectations, 
Lady Charlotte,” said Robert, with a slightly sarcastic em¬ 
phasis. 

“ Elsmere, who is that man talking to Miss Leyburn ? ” asked 
Langham as the two friends stood side by side, a little later, 
watching the spectacle. 

“ A certain Mr. Flaxman, brother to a pretty little neighbor 
of ours in Surrey—Lady Helen Varley—and nephew to Lady 
Charlotte. I have not seen him here before ; but I think the 
girls like him.” 

“ Is he the Flaxman who got the mathematical prize at 
Berlin last year ? ” 

Yes, I believe so. A striking person altogether. He is 
enormously rich. Lady Helen tells me, in spite of an elder 
brother. All the money in his mother’s family has come to 
him, and he is the heir to Lord Daniel’s great Derbyshire 
property. Twelve years ago I used to hear him talked about 
Incessantly by' the Cambridge men one met. “ Citizen Flax¬ 
man ” they called him, for his opinions’ sake. He would ask 
his scout to dinner, and insist on dining with his own servants, 
aud shaking hands with his friends’ butlers. The scouts and 
the butlers put an end to that, and altogether, I imagine, the 
world disappointed him. He has a stoiy, poor fellow, too—a 
young wife, who died with her first baby ten years ago. The 
world supposes him never^to have got over it, which makes 
him all the more interesting. A distinguished face, don’t you 
think ?—the good type of English aristocrat.” 

Langham assented. But his attention was fixed on the 
group in which Rose’s bright hair was conspicuous ; and when 
Robert left him and went to amuse Mrs. Leyburn, he still stood 
rooted to the same spot watching. Rose was leaning against 
the piano, one hand behind her, her whole attitude full of a 
^oung, easy, self-confident grace. IVIr. Flaxman was standing 
beside her, and they were deep in talk—serious talk apparently, 
to judge by her quiet manner and the charmed, attentive 
interest of his look. Occasionally, however, there was a sally 
on her part, and an answering flash of laughter on his ; but 
the stream of conversation closed immediately over the inter¬ 
ruption, and flowed on as evenly as before. 

Unconsciously Langham retreated further and further into 


nOBEUT ELBMERE. 


4:}6 

the comparative darkness of the inner room. He felt himself 
singularly insigniticant and out of place, and he made no more 
efforts to talk. Rose played a violin solo, and played it with 
astonishing delicacy and fire. When it was over Langham saw 
her turn from the applauding circle crowding in upon her and 
throw a smiling interrogative look over her shoulder at Mr. 
Flaxman. Mr. Flaxman bent over her, and as he spoke 
Langliam cauglit her flush and the excited sparkle of her eyes. 
Was this the “ some one in the stream ”? No doubt ?—no 
doubt! 

When the party broke up Langham found himself borne 
toward the outer room, and before he knew where he was 
going he was standing beside her. 

“ Are you here still ? she said to him, startled, as he held 
ont his hand. He replied by some comments on the music, a 
little lumbering and infelicitous, as all his small-talk was. She 
hardly listened, but presently she looked up nervously, com¬ 
pelled as it were b}^ the great melancholy eyes above her. 

“ We are not always in this turmoil, Mr. Langham. Per¬ 
haps some other day you will come and make friends with my 
mother ? ” 


CHAPTER XXXII. 

Naturally, it was during their two months of autumn 
travel that Elsmere and Catherine first realized in detail what 
Elsmere’s act was to mean to them, as husband and wife, in the 
future. Each left England with the most tender and heroic 
resolves. And no one who knows anything of life will need 
to be told that even for these two finely natured people such 
resolves were infinitel}^ easier to make than to carry out. 

“ I will not preach to you—I will not persecute you ! ” 
Catherine had said to her husband at the moment of her first 
shock and anguish. And she did her utmost, poor thing, to keep 
her word ! All through the innumerable bitternesses Avhich 
accompanied Elsmere’s withdrawal from Murewell—the letters 
wliich followed them, the remonstrances of public and private 
friends, the paragraphs which found their way, do what they 
would, into the newspapers—the pain of deserting, as it seemed 
to her, certain poor and helpless folk who had been taught to 
look to her and Robert, and whose bewildered lamentations 
came to them through young Armitstead—through all this she 
held her peace ; she did her best to soften Robert’s grief ; she 
never once reproached him with her own. 

But at the same time the inevitable separation of their inmost 
hopes and beliefs had thrown her back on herself, had immense- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


437 


ly strengthened that puritan independent fiber in her which her 
youth had developed, and which lier happy marriage had only 
temporarily masked, not weakened. Never had Catherine be¬ 
lieved so strongly and intensely as now, when the husband,who 
had been the guide and inspirerof her religious life, had given 
up the old faith and practices. By virtue of a kind of nervous 
instinctive dread, his relaxations bred increased rigidit^^ in her.j 
Often when she was alone—or at night—she was seized with a>, 
lonely, an awful sense of responsibility. Oa ! let her guard 
her faith, not only for her own sake, her child’s, her Lord’s, 
but for his —that it might be given to her patience at last to 
lead him back. 

And the only way in which it seemed to her possible to guard 
it was to set up certain barriers of silence. Slie feared that 
fiery, persuasive quality in Robert she had so often seen at work 
on other people. With him conviction was life—it was the man 
himself, to an extraordinary degree. How was she to resist the 
pressure of these new ardors with which his mind was filling— 
she who loved him!—except by building, at any rate for the 
time, an inclosure of silence round her Christian beliefs ? It 
was in some way a pathetic repetition of the situation between 
Robert and the squire in the early days of their friendship, but 
in Catherine’s mind there was no troubling presence of new 
knowledge conspiring from within with the force without. At 
this moment of her life she was more passionately convinced 
than ever that the only knowledge truly worth having in this 
world was the knowledge of God’s mercies in Christ. 

So gradually with a gentle persistency she withdrew certain 
parts of herself from Robert’s ken; she avoided certain sub¬ 
jects, or anything that might lead to them; she ignored the 
religions and philosophical books he was constantly reading; 
she prayed and thought alone—always of him, of him—but still 
resolutely alone. It was impossible, however, that so great a 
change in their life could be effected without a perpetual sense 
of breaking links, a perpetual series of dumb wounds and griefs 
on both sides. There came a moment when, as he sat alone 
one evening in a pine wood above the Lake of Geneva, Elsmere 
suddenly awoke to the conviction that in spite of all his efforts 
and illusions, their relation to each other was altering, dwindl¬ 
ing, impoverishing : the terror of that summer night at Mure- 
well was being dismally justified. 

His own mind during this time was in a state of perpetual 
discovery, ‘‘ sailing the seas where there was never sand ”—the 
vast, shadowy seas of speculative thought. All his life, reserve 
to those nearest to him had been pain and grief to him. He 



438 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


was one of those people, as we know, who throw off readily: to 
whom sympathy, expansion, are indispensable; who suffer phys¬ 
ically and mentally from anything cold and rigid beside them. 
And now, at every turn, in their talk, their reading, in many 
of the smallest details of their common existence, Elsmere be¬ 
gan to feel the presence of this cold and rigid something. He 
was ever conscious of self-defense on her side, of pained draw¬ 
ing back on his. And with every succeeding effort of his at 
self-repression, it seemed to him as though fresh nails were 
driven into the coffin of that old free habit of perfect confidence 
which had made the heaven of their life since they had been 
man and wife. 

He sat on for long, through the September evening, ponder¬ 
ing, wrestling. Was it simply inevitable, the natural result of 
his own act, and of her antecedents, to which he must submit 
himself, as to any mutilation or loss of power in the body ? 
The young lover and husband rebelled—the believer rebelled— 
against the admission. Probably if his change had left him 
anchorless and forsaken, as it leaves many men, he would have 
been ready enough to submit, in terror lest his own forlornness 
should bring about hers. But in spite of the intellectual con¬ 
fusion which inevitably attends any wholesale reconstruction 
of a man’s platform of action, he had never been more sure of 
God, or the Divine aims of the world, than now ; never more 
open than now, amid this exquisite Alpine world, to those pas¬ 
sionate moments of religious trust which are man’s eternal de¬ 
fiance to the iron silences about him. Originally, as’we know, 
he had shrunk from the thought of change in her correspond¬ 
ing to his own; now that his own foothold was strengthening, 
his longing for a new union was overpowering that old dread. 
The proselytizing instinct may be never quite morally defensi¬ 
ble, even as between husband and wife. Nevertheless, in all 
strong, convinced, and ardent souls it exists, and must be 
reckoned with. 

At last one evening he was overcome by a sudden impulse 
which neutralized for the moment his nervous dread of hurting 
her. Some little incident of their day together was rankling, 
and it was borne in upon him that almost any violent protest 
ou her part would have been preferable to this constant soft 
evasion of hers, which was gradually, imperceptibly dividing 
heart from heart. 

They were in a bare attic room at the very top of one of the 
huge newly built hotels which during the last twenty years have 
invaded all the high places of Switzerland. The August which 
had been so hot in England had been rainy and broken in Swit- 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


439 


zerlaiid. But it had been followed by a warm and mellow Sep¬ 
tember, and the favorite hotels below a certain height were still 
full. When the Elsmeres arrived at Les Avants, this scantily 
furnished garret, out of which some servants had been hurried 
to make room for them, was all that could be found. They, 
however, liked it for its space and its view. They looked side¬ 
ways from their window on to the upper end of the lake, three 
thousand feet below them. Opposite, across the blue water, rose 
a grandiose rampart of mountains, the stage on which from 
morn till night the sun went through a long transformation 
scene of beauty. The water was marked every now and then 
by passing boats and steamers—tiny specks which served to 
measure the vastness of all around them. To right and left, 
spurs of green mountain shutout alike the lower lake and the 
icy splendors of the “ Valais depths profound.” What made the 
charm of the narrow prospect was, first, the sense it produced 
in the spectator of hanging dizzily above the lake, with infinite 
air below him, and, then, the magical elfects of dawn and even¬ 
ing, when wreaths of mist would blot out the valley and the 
lake, and leave the eye of the watcher face to face across the 
fathomless abyss with the majestic mountain mass, and its at¬ 
tendant retinue of clouds, as though they and he were alone in 
the universe. 

It was a peaceful September night. From the open window 
beside him Robert could see a world of high moonlight, limited 
and invaded on all sides by sharp, black masses of shade. A few 
rare lights glimmered on the spreading alp below, and every 
now and then a breath of music came to them, wafted from a 
military band playing a mile or two away. They had been 
climbing most of the afternoon, and Catherine was lying down, 
her brown hair loose about her, the thin oval of her face and 
clear line of brow just visible in the dim candle-light. 

Suddenly he stretched out his hand for his Greek Testa¬ 
ment, which was always near him, though there had been no 
common reading since that bitter day of his confession to her. 
The mark still lay in the well-worn volume at the point reached 
in their last reading at Murewell. He opened upon it, and 
began the eleventh chapter of St. John. 

Catherine trembled when she saw him take up the book. 
He began without preface, ti-eating the passage before him in 
his usual way—that is to say, taking verse after verse in the 
Greek, translating and commenting. She never spoke all 
through, and at last he closed the little Testament and bent 
toward her, his look full of feeling. 

“ Catherine ! can’t you let me—will you never let me tell 


440 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


you, uow, liow that story—how tlie old things—affect me, from 
the new point of view? You alwaj^s stop me when I try. I 
believe you think of me as having thrown it all away. Would 
it not comfort you sometimes if you knew that although much 
of the Gospels, this very raising of Lazarus, for instance, seem 
to me no longer true in the liistorical sense, still they are al¬ 
ways full to me of an ideal, a poetical truth ? Lazarus may 
-not have died and come to life, may never have existed ; but 
still to me, now as always, love for Jesus of Nazareth is 
‘ resurrection ’ and ‘ life.’ ” 


lie spoke with the most painful diffidence, the most wistful 
tenderness. 

Thei-e was a pause. Then Catherine said, in a rigid, con¬ 
strained voice: 

“ If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, as reality, I 
can not see how they are true at all, or of any value.” 

The next minute she rose, and going to the little wooden 
dressing-table, she began to brush out and plait for the night 
her straight, silky veil of hair. As she passed him Robert saw 
her face pale and set. 

He sat quiet another moment or two, and then he went to¬ 
ward her and took tier in his arms. 

“Catherine,” he said to her, his lips trembling, “am I never 
to speak my mind to you any more ? Do you mean alwaj^s to 
hold rne at arm’s length—to refuse always to hear what I have 
to sa}^ in defense of the change which has cost us both so 
much ? ” 

She hesitated, trying hard to restrain herself. But it was of 
no use. ‘ She broke into tears—quiet but most bitter tears. 

“ Robert, I can not ! Oh ! you must see that I can not. It 
is not because I am hard, but because I am weak. How can 
I stand up against 3^011 ? I dare not—I dare not. If ^mu 
were not j^ourself—not ni}?- husband—” 

Her voice dro])ped. Robert guessed that at the bottom of 
her resistance there was an intolerable fear of what love might 
do with her if she once gave it an opening. He felt himself 
cruel, brutal, and 3^et an urgent sense of all that was at stake 
drove him on. 

“ I would not press or worry jmu, God knows ! ” he said 
almost piteously, kissing her forehead as she lay against lum. 

“ But remember, Catherine, I can not put these things aside. 
I once thought I could—that I could fall back on my historical 


concerned. But I can not. They lill 


my 


mind more and 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


441 


to put my conclusions about them into shape. And all the time 
this is going on, are you and I to remain strangers to one an¬ 
other in all that concerns our truest life—are we, Catherine ! ” 

He spoke in a low voice of intense feeling. She turned her 
face and pressed her lips to his hand. Both had the scene in 
the wood-path after her flight and return in their minds, and 
both were tilled with a despairing sense of the difliculty of 
living, not through great crises, but through the details of 
eveiy day. 

“ Could you not work at other things ? ” she whispered. 

He was silent, looking straight before him into the moon¬ 
light shimmer and white, spectral hazes of the valley, his arms 
still round her. 

“ No ! ” he burst out at last ; “ not till I have satisfied my¬ 
self. I feel it burning within me, like a command from God, 
to work out the problem, to make it clearer to myself—and to 
others,” he added, deliberately. 

Her heart sank within her. The last words called up before 
her a dismal future of controversy and publicit\^, in which at 
every step she would be condemning her husband. 

“ And all this time, all these years, })erhaps,” he went on— 
before, in her perplexity, she would find words—“ is my wife 
never going to let me speak freely to her ? Am I to act, think, 
judge, without her knowledge? Is she to know less of me 
than a friend, less even than the public for whom I write or 
speak ? ” 

It seemed intolerable to him, all the more that every mo¬ 
ment they stood there together it was being impressed upon 
him that in fact this Avas what she meant, what she had con¬ 
templated from the beginning. 

Robert, I can not defend myself against you,” slie cried, 
again clinging to him. “ Oh, think for me ! You know what 
I feel ; that I dare not risk what is not mine ! ” 

He kissed her again, and then moved away from her to the 
window. It began to be plain to him that his effort was 
merely futile and had better not have been made. But his 
heart was very sore. 

“ Do you ever ask yourself,” he said presently, looking 
steadily into the night—“ no, I don’t think you can, Cathei’ine 
—what part the reasoning faculty, that faculty whicli marks 
us out from the animal, was meant to play in life ? Did God • 
give it to us simply that you might trample upon it and ignore 
it, both in yourself and me 

She had dropped into a chaii*, and sat with clasped hands, 
her hair falling about her white dressing gown, and framing 


442 


ROBERT ELSMERE: 


the nobly featured face blanclied by the moonlight. She did 
not attempt a reply, but the melancholy of an invincible reso¬ 
lution, which was, so to speak, not her own doing, but rather 
was like a necessity imposed upon her from outside, breathed 
through her silence. 

He turned and looked at her. She raised her arms, and the 
gesture reminded him for a moment of the Donatello figure in 
the jNturewell library—the same delicate, austere beauty, the 
same tenderness, the same underlying reserve. He took her 
outstretched hands and held them against his breast. His 
hotly beating heart told him that he was perfectly right, and 
that to accept the barriers she was setting up would impover¬ 
ish all their future life together. But he could not struggle 
with the woman on whom he had already inflicted so severe a 
practical trial. ]\[oreover, he felt strangely as he stood there 
the danger of rousing in her those illimitable possibilities of 
the religious temper, the dread of which had once before 
risen specter-like in his heart. 

So once more he yielded. She rewarded him with all the 
charm, all the delightfulness of which under the circumstances 
she was mistress. They wandered up the Rhone valley, through 
the St. Gothard, and spent a fortnight between Como and Lu¬ 
gano. During these days her one thought was to revive and 
refresh him, and he let her tend him, and lent himself to the 
various heroic futilities by which she would try-^as part of her 
nursing mission—to make the future look less empty and their 
distress less real. Of course under all this delicate give and 
take both suffered; both felt that the promise of their marriage 
had failed them, and that thejHiad come dismally down to sec¬ 
ond best. But after all they were young, and the autumn was 
beautiful—and though they hurt each other, they Avere alone 
^ together and constantly, passionately interested in each other. 
Italy, too, softened all things—even Catherine’s English tone 
and tem])er. As long as the delicious luxuiy of the Italian 
autumn, with all its primitive pagan suggestiveness, was still 
round them ; as long as they Avere still among the cities of the 
Lombard plain—that battle-groimd and higlnvay of nations, 
Avhich roused all Robert’s historical enthusiasm, and set him 
reading, discussing, thinking, in his old impetuous Avay, about 
something else than minute problems of Christian evidence— 
the new-born friction between them Avas necessarily reduced 
to a minimum. 

But Avith their return home, Avith their plunge into London 
life, the difficulties of the situation began to define themselves 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


443 


more sharply. In after-years, one of Catherine’s dearest 
memories was the memory of their iiist installment in the 
Bedford Square house. Robert’s anxiety to make it pleasant 
and home-like was pitiful to watch. He had none of the 
modern passion for upholstery, and probably the vaguest 
notions of what was a?sthetically correct. But during their 
furnishing days he was never tired of wandering about in 
search of pretty things—a rug, a screen, an engraving—which 
might brighten the rooms in which Catlierine was to live. He 
would put everything in its place with a restless eagerness, 
and then Catherine would be called in, and would play lier 
part bravely. She would smile and ask questions, and admire, 
and then when Robert had gone, she would move slowly to 
the window and look out at the great mass of the British 
Museum frowning beyond the little dingy strip of garden, 
with a sick longing in her heart for the Slurewell corn-field, 
the wood-path, the village, the free air-bathed spaces of heath 
and common. Oh ! this huge London, with its unfathomable 
poverty and its heartless wealth—how it oppressed and be¬ 
wildered her ! Its mere grime and squalor, its murky, poisoned 
atmosphere, were a perpetual trial to the countrywoman 
brought up amid the dash of mountain streams and the scents 
of mountain pastures. She drooped physically for a time, as 
did the child. 

But morally ! AYith Catlierine everything really depended 
bn the moral state. She could have followed Robert to a 
London living witli a joy and hope Avhich would liave com¬ 
pletely deadened all these repulsions of the senses now so 
active in her. But without this inner glow, in the presence of 
the profound spiritual difference circumstances had developed 
between her and the man she loved, everything was a burden. 
Even her religion, though she clung to it with an ever-increas¬ 
ing tenacity, failed at this period to bring her much comfort. 
Every night it seemed to her that the day had been one long 
and dreary struggle to make something out of nothing ; and 
in the morning the night, too, seemed to have been alive with 
conflict— All thy waves and thy storms have gone over 7 ne ! 

Robert guessed it all, and whatever remorseful love could 
do to soften such a strain and burden he tried to (lo. He en¬ 
couraged her to find work among the ])Oor ; he tried in the 
tenderest ways to interest her in the great spectacle of London 
life which was alread}^, in spite of yearning and regret, begin¬ 
ning to fascinate and absoi-b liimself. But their standards 
were now so different that she was constantly shrinking from 
what attracted him, or painfully judging what was to him 


444 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


merely curious and interesting. He was really more and more 
oppressed by her intellectual limitations, though never con¬ 
sciously Avould he have allowed himself to admit them, and she 
was more and more bewildered by what constantlj'’ seemed to 
her a breaking-up of principle, a relaxation of moral fiber. 

And the work among the poor was difficult. Robert in- 
stintively felt that for him to offer his sei’vices in charitable 
work to the narrow Evangelical, whose church Catherine had 
joined, would have been merely to invite rebuff. So that even 
in the love and care of the unfortunate they were separated. 
For he had not yet found a sphere of work, and, if he had, 
Catherine’s invincible impulse in these matters was alwaj^s to 
attach herself to the authorities and powers that be. He could 
only acquiesce when she suggested a})plying to Mr. Clarendon 
for some charitable occupation for herself. 

After her letter to him, Catherine had an interview with the 
vicar at his home. She was puzzled by the start and sudden 
pause for recollection with which he received her name, the 
tone of com])assion which crept into his talk with her, the pity¬ 
ing look and grasp of the hand with which he dismissed her. 
Then, as she walked home, it flashed upon her that she had 
seen a co])y, some weeks old, of the Record lying on the 
good man’s table, the veiy copy which contained Robert’s 
name among the list of men who during the last ten years had 
thrown up the Anglican ministry. The delicate face flushed 
miserably from brow to chin. Pitied for being Robert’s wife ! 
Oh, monstrous !—incredible ! 

Meanwhile Robert, man-like, in spite of all the griefs and 
sorenesses of the position, had immeasurably the best of it. In 
the first place such incessant activity" of mind as his is in itself 
both tonic and narcotic. It was constantly generating in him 
fresh purposes and hopes, constantly deadening regret, and 
pushing the old things out of sight. He was full of many pro¬ 
jects, literaiy and social, but they were all in truth the fruits 
of one long experimental process, the passionate attempt of the 
reason to justify to itself the God in whom the heart believed. 
Abstract thought, as JMr. Grey saw, had had comparatively lit¬ 
tle to do with Elsmere’s relinquishment of the Church of Eng¬ 
land. But as soon as the Christian bases of faith were over¬ 
thrown, that faith had naturall}^ to find for itself other supports 
and attachments. For faith itself—in God and a spiritual 
order—had been so wrought into the nature by years of rever¬ 
ent and adoring living that nothing could destro}^ it. With 
Elsmere, as with all men of religious temperament, belief in 
Cliristianity and faith in God had not at the outset been a mat' 


nOBEHT ELSMERE. 


445 


ter of reasoning at all, but of sympathy, feeling, association, 
daily experience. Tlien the intellect had broken in, and de- 
stro 3 "ed or transformed the belief in Christianity. But after the 
crash,emerged as strong as ever, only craving and eager 
to make a fresh peace, a fresh compact with the reason. 

Elsmere had heard Grey say long ago in one of the few mo¬ 
ments of real intimacy he had enjo^^ed with him at Oxford, 
“ My interest in philosophy springs solely from the chance it 
offers me of kjiowing sornetliing more of God ! ” Driven b}^ the 
same thirst, he too threw himself into the same quest, pushing 
his way laboriously through the philosophical borderlands of 
science, through the ethical speculation of the day, through the 
history of man’s moral and religious past. And while on the 
one hand the intellect was able to contribute an ever-stronger 
support to the faith which was the man, on the other the sphere 
in him of a patient ignorance which abstains from all attempts 
at knowing what man can not know, and substitutes trust for 
either knowledge or despair, was pcrpetuall}^ widening. “ 1 
take my stand on conscience and the moral life ! ” was the up¬ 
shot of it all. “In them I hud my God ! As for all these 
various probleins, ethical and scientific, which ^mu pi-ess upon 
me, my pessimist friend, I, too, am bewildered ; T, too, have 
no explanation to offer. But I trust and wait. In spite of 
them—be^mnd them—I have abundantly enough for faith—for 
hope—for action ! ” 

We may quote a passage or two from some letters of his writ¬ 
ten at this time to that young Armitstead who had taken his 
])lace at Murewell, and was still there till Mowbra}^ Elsmere 
should appoint a new man. Armitstead had been a college 
friend of Elsmere’s. He was a High Churchman of a singu¬ 
larly gentle and delicate type, and the manner in which he had 
received Elsmere’s story on the day of his arrival at Murewell 
had permanently endeared him to the teller of it. At the 
same time the defection from Christianity of a man who at 
|() xford had been to him the object of much hero-worship, and, 
since Oxford, an example of pastoral efliciencjq had painfully 
affected young Armitstead, and he began a correspondence 
Avith Robert which was in many waA^’s a relief to both. In 
Switzerland and Italv, Avhen his wife’s gentle, inexorable 
silence became too op])ressive to him, Robert would pour him¬ 
self out in letters to Armitstead, and the correspondence did 
not altogether cease with his return to London. To the squire 
during the same period Elsmere also wrote frequenthq but 
rarely or never on religious matters. 

On one occasion Armitstead had been pressing the favorite 


446 


ROBEUT ELSMERE. 


Christian dilemma—Christianity or nothing. Inside Christian¬ 
ity, light and certainty ; outside it, chaos. “ If it were not for 
the Gospels and the Church I should be a Positivist to-morrow. 
Your Tlieism is a mere arbitrary hypothesis, at the mercy of 
any rival philosophical theory. How, regarding our position 
as precarious, you should come to regard your own as stable, 
is to me incomprehensible ! ” 

“ What I conceive to be the vital difference between Theism 
and Christianity,” wrote Elsmere in reply, “ is that as an ex¬ 
planation of things Theism can never he disproved. At the 
worst it must always remain in the position of an alternative 
hypothesis, which the hostile man of science can not destroy, 
though he is under no obligation to adopt it. Broadly speak¬ 
ing, it is not the facts which are in dispute, but the inference 
to be drawn from them. 

“ Now, considering the enormous complication of the facts, 
the Theistic inference will, to put it at the lowest, always have 
its place, always command respect. Tlie man of science may 
not adopt it, but by no advance of science that I, at any rate, 
can foresee, can it be driven out of the field. 

“ Christianity is in a totally different position. Its grounds 
are not philosophical but literary and historical. It rests not 
upon all facts, but upon a special group of facts. It is, and 
will always remain, a great literary and historical problem, a 
question of documents and testimony. Hence, the Christian 
explanation is vulnerable in a way in which the Theistic ex¬ 
planation can never be vulnerable. The contention, at any 
rate, of persons in my position is ; That to the man who has 
had the f^pecial training required, and in whom this training 
had not been neutralized by any overwhelming bias of tempera¬ 
ment, it can be as clearly demonstrated that the miraculous 
Christian story rests on a tissue of mistake, as it can be 
demonstrated that the Isidorian Decretals were a forgery, or 
the correspondence of Paul and Seneca a pious fraud, or thnt 
the medieval belief in witchcraft Avas the product of physical 
ignorance and superstition.” 

“ You say,” he wrote again, in another connection, to Armit- 
stead from Milan, “you say you think 1113^ later letters have 
been far too aggressive and positive. I, too, am astonished at 
myself. I do not know 1113^ oAvn mood, it is so clear, so sharp, 
so combative. It is the spectacle of Ital3q I Avonder—of a coun¬ 
try practically Avithout religion—the spectacle in fact of Latin 
Europe as a Av hole, and the practical Atheism in Avhich it is in¬ 
gulfed ? JMy^ dear friend, the ])roblem of the world at this mo¬ 
ment is— how to find a religion? —some great conception Avhich 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


447 


shall be once more capable, as the old were capable, of wielding 
societies, and keeping men’s brutish elements in check. Surely 
Christianity of the traditional sort is failing everywhere—less 
•obviously with us, and in Teutonic Europe generally, but 
•egregiously, notoriousl}^, in all the Catholic countries. We talk 
•complacently of the decline of Buddhism. But what have we 
to say of the decline of Christianity ? And yet this last is in¬ 
finitely more striking and more tragic, inasmuch as it affects a 
more important section of mankind. I, at any rate, am not one 
-of those who would seek to minimize the results of this decline 
for human life, nor can I bring myself to believe that Positiv¬ 
ism or ‘ evolutional morality ’ will ever satisfy the race. 

“ In the period of social struggle which undeniably lies before 
us, both in the old and the new world, are Ave then to Avdtness a 
war of classes, unsofttmed by the ideal hopes, the ideal law, of 
faith ? It looks like it. What does the artisan class, what does 
the town democracy throughout Europe, care an^" longer for 
Christian checks or Christian sanctions as they have been taught 
to understand them ? Superstition, in certain parts of rural 
Europe, there is in plenty, but wherever you get intelligence 
and therefore movement, you get at once either indifference to, 
or a passionate break with, Christianity. And consider Avhat it 
means, what it will mean, this Atheism of the great democracies 
which are to be our masters! The Avorld has never seen any¬ 
thing like it; such spiritual anarchy and poverty combined Avith 
such material power and resource. Every society—Christian 
and non-Christian—has always till now had its ideal, of greater 
or less ethical value, its appeal to something beyond man. Has 
Christianity brought us to this: that the Christian nations are 
to be the first in the world’s history to try the experiment of a 
life without faith—that life Avhich you and I, at any rate, are 
agreed in thinking a life worthy only of the brute ? 

“ Oh, forgive me ! These things must hurt you—they would 
have hurt me in the old days—but they burn Avithin me, and you 
bid me speak out. What if it be God himself Avho is driving 
his painful lesson home to me, to you, to the world ? What 
does it mean, this gradual groAvth of what we call infidelit}^, of 
criticism and science on the one hand, this gradual death of the 
old traditions on the other. Sm, you ansAver, the enmity of the 
human mind against God, the momentary triumph of Satan, 
And so you acquiesce, heavy-hearted, in God’s present defeat, 
looking for vengeance and requital hereafter. Well, I am not 
so ready to believe in man’s capacity to rebel against his Maker ! 
Where you see ruin and sin, I see the urgent process of divine 
education. God’s steady, ineluctable command “ to put away 


448 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


childish things,” the pressure of his spirit on ours toward neW 
ways of worship and new forms of love ! ” 

And after a while, it was with these “ new ways of worship 
and new forms of love ” that the mind began to be perpetually 
occupied. The break with the old things was no sooner com¬ 
plete than the eager soul, incapable then, as always, of resting 
in negation or opposition, pressed passionately forward to a new 
synthesis, not only speculative, but practical. Before it rose 
perpetually the haunting vision of another palace of faith—an¬ 
other c’hurch or company of the faithful, which was to become 
the shelter of human aspiration amid the desolation and anarchy 
caused by the crashing of the old ! How many men and 
women must have gone through the same strait as itself— 
how many must be watching with it through the darkness for 
the rising of a new City of God ! 

One afternoon, close upon Christmas, he found himself in 
Parliament Square, on his way toward Westminster Bridge 
and the Embankment. The beauty of a sunset sky behind the 
abbey arrested him, and he stood leaning over the railings be¬ 
side the Peele statue to look. 

The day before he had passed the same spot with a German 
friend. His companion—a man of influence and mark in his 
own country, who had been brought up, however, in England, 
and knew it well—had stopped before the abbey and had said 
to him with emphasis : “ I never find myself in this particular 
spot of London without a sense of emotion and reverence. 
Other people feel that in treading the Forum of Rome they are 
at the center of human things. I am more thrilled by West¬ 
minster than Rome ; your venerable abbey is to me the sym¬ 
bol of a nationality to which the modern world owes obliga¬ 
tions it can never repay. You are rooted deep in the past ; 
you have also a future of infinite expansiveness stretching be¬ 
fore you. Among European nations at this moment jmu alone 
have freedom in the true sense, you alone have religion. I 
would give a year of life to know what you will have made of 
your freedom and your religion two hundred years hence ! ” 

As Robert recalled the words, the abbey lay before him, 
wrapped in the bluish haze of the wintry afternoon. Only the 
towers rose out of the mist, gray and black against the red 
bands of cloud. A pair of pigeons circled round them, as 
careless and free in flight as though they were alone with the 
towers and the sunset. Below, the streets were full of people ; 
the omnibuses rolled to and fro ; the lamps were just lighted ; 
lines of straggling figures, dark in the half light, were crossing 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


449 


t])e street here and there. And to all the human rush and 
swirl below, the quiet of the abbey and the infinite red dis¬ 
tances of sky gave a peculiar pathos and significance. 

Robert filled his eye and sense, and then walked quickly 
away toward the Embankment. Carrying the poetry and 
grandeur of England’s past with him, he turned his face east¬ 
ward to the great new-made London on the other side of St. 
Paul’s, the London of the democracy of the nineteenth cen¬ 
tury, and of the future. He was wrestling with himself, a prey 
to one of those critical moments of life, when circumstance 
seems once more to restore to us the power of choice, of dis¬ 
tributing a Yes or a No among the great solicitations which 
meet the human spirit on its path from silence to silence. The 
thought of his friend’s reverence, and of his own personal 
debt toward the country to whose long travail of centuries he 
owed all his own joys and faculties, was hot within him. 

“ Here and here did England help me—how can I help England,—say! ” 

All! that vast and chaotic London south and east of the 
great church ! He already knew something of it. A Liberal 
clergyman there, settled in the very blackest, busiest heart of 
it, had already made him welcome on Mr. Grey’s introduction. 
He had gone with this good man on several occasions through 
some little fraction of that teeming world, now so hidden and 
peaceful between the murky river mists and the cleaner, light- 
filled grays of the sky. He had heard much, and pondered a 
good deal, the quick mind caught at once by the differences, 
some tragic, some merelj^ curious and stimulating, between 
the monotonous life of his own rural folk, and the mad rush, 
the voracious hurry, the bewildering appearances and disap¬ 
pearances, the sudden ingulfrnents, of working London. 

Moreover, he had spent a Sunda}’ or two wandering among 
the East End churches, There, rather than among the streets 
and courts outside, as it had seemed to him, lay the tragedy of 
the city. Such emptiness, such desertion, such a hopeless 
breach between the great craving need outside and the boon 
offered it within ! Here and there, indeed, a patch of bright- 
colored success, as it claimed to be, where the primitive ten¬ 
dency of man toward the organized excitement of religious 
ritual, visible in all nations and civilizations, had been appealed 
to with more energy and more results than usual. But in 
general, blank failure, or rather obvious want of success—as 
the devoted men not beating the void there were themselves the 
first to admit, with pain and patient submission to the inscru¬ 
table Will of God. 


450 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


But is it not time we assured ourselves, he Avas ahvays ask¬ 
ing, whether God is still in truth behind the offer man is per¬ 
petually making to his brother man oil IBs behalf ? lie Avas 
behind it once, and it had efficacy, had poAver. But iioaa'— 
Avhat if all these processes of so-called destruction and decay 
Avere but the mere Avorkiiigsof that divine plastic force Avliich 
is forever molding Imman'^ociety ? What if these beautiful, 
venerable things Avhich had fallen from him, as from thousands 
of his felloAvs, represented, in the present stage of the world’s 
history, not the props, but the hindrances, of man ? 

And if all these large things were true, as he belicAmd, Avhat 
shoul be the individual’s part in this transition in England ? 
Surely, at the least, a part of plain sincerity of act and speech— 
a correspondence as perfect as could be reached between tlie 
inner faith and the outer Avord and deed. So much, at the 
least, Avas clearly required of him ! 

“Do not imagine,” he said to himself, as though Avith a 
fierce dread of possible self-delusion, “that it is in jmu to play 
any great, any commanding part. Shun the tliought of it, if 
it were possible ! But let me do Avhat is given me to do ! 
Here, in this human Avilderness, may I spend AvhateA^er of time 
or energy or faculty may be mine, in the faithful attempt to 
held foi'Avard the new House of Faith that is to be, though my 
utmost efforts should but succeed in laying some obscure stone 
in still unseen foundations ! Let me tiy and hand on to some 
other human soul, or souls, before I die, the truth Avhich has 
freed, and Avhich is noAV sustaining, my OAvn heart. Can any 
man do more ? Is not CA^ery man Avho feels any certaint}^ in 
him Avhatever bound to do as much ? What matter if the wise 
folk scoff, if even at times, and in a certain sense, one seems to 
one’s-self ridiculous—absurdly lonely and poAverless ! All great 
changes are preceded bj^ numbers of sporadic and, as the by¬ 
stander thinks, impotent efforts. But while the individual 
effort sinks, drowned perilaps in mockery, the general move¬ 
ment quickens, gathers force Ave knoAV not hoAA", and : 

. “ While the tired wave vainly breaking, 

Seems here no painful inch to gain, 

Far back through creeks and inlets making. 

Comes silent, flooding in the main ! ” 

Darkness sank over the river ; all the gray and purple dis¬ 
tance Avith its dim edge of spires and domes against the sky, 
all the vague, intervening blackness of street, bridge, or rail- 
Avay station Avoi-e starred and patterned Avith lights. The vast¬ 
ness, the beauty of the city filled him with a sense of mysterious 
attraction, and as he walked on Avith his face uplifted to it, it 


IWBEliT ELSMEBE. 


451 


was as though he took his life in his hand and flung it afrosh 
into the human gulf. 

What does it matter if one’s work be raw and uncomely ! 
All that lies outside the great organized traditions of an age 
must alwa^^s look so. Let me bear my witness bravely, not 
spending life in speech, but not undervaluing speech—above 
all, not being ashamed or afraid of it, because otherwise people 
may prefer a policy of silence. A man has but the one puny 
life, the one tiny spark of faith. Better be venturesome with 
both for God’s sake, than overcautious, overthrifty. And—to 
his own Master he standeth or falleth ! ” 

Plans of work of all kinds, literary and i:>ractical, thoughts 
of preaching in some bare, hidden room to men and women 
orphaned and stranded like himself, began to crowd upon him. 
The old clerical instinct in him winced at some of them. Rob¬ 
ert had nothing of the sectary about him by nature ; he was 
always too deeply and easily affected by the great historic 
existences about him. But Avhen the Oxford man or the ex- 
ofticial of one of the most venerable and decorous of societies 
protested, the believer, or, if you will, the enthusiast, put the 
protest by. 

And so the dream gathered substance and stayed with him, 
till at last he found himself at his own door. As he closed it 
behind him, Catherine came out into the pretty old hall from 
the dining-room. 

“ Robert, have you walked all the Avay ? ” 

“ Yes. I came along the Embankment. Such a beautiful 
evening ! ” 

lie slipped his arm inside hers, and they mounted the stairs 
together. She glanced at him wistfully. She was perfectly 
aware that these months were to him months of incessant tra-' 
vail of spirit, and she caught at this moment the old strenuous 
look of eye and brow she knew so well. A year ago, and 
eveiy thought of his mind had been open to her—and now— 
she herself had shut them out—but her heart sank within her. 

She turned and kissed him. He bent his head fondly over 
her. But inwardly all the ardor of his mood collapsed at the 
touch of her. For the protests of a world in arms can be with¬ 
stood with joy, but the protest that steals into your heart, that 
takes love’s garb and uses love’s ways— there is the difficulty ! 

CHAPTER XXXIII. 

But Robert was some time in finding his opening, in realiz¬ 
ing any fraction of his dream. At first he tried to work under 
the Broad Church vicar to whom Grey had introduced him. He 


452 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


-”iidertook some rent-collecting, and some evening lectures on 
elementary science to boys and men. But after a while he 
began to feel his position false and unsatisfactory. In truth, 
his opinions were in the main identical with those of the vicar 
under whom he was acting. But Mr. Vernon was a Broad 
Churchman, belonged to the Church Reform movement, and 
thought it absolutely necessary to “keep things going,” and by 
a policy of prudent silence and gradual expansion from within, 
to save the great “ plant ” of the Establishment from falling 
wholesale into the hands of the High Churchmen. In conse¬ 
quence he was involved, as Robert held, in endless contradic¬ 
tions and practical falsities of speech and action. Ilis large 
church was attended by a handful of some fifty to a hundred 
persons. Vernon could not preach what he did believe, and 
would not preach, more than was absolutely necessary, what 
he did not believe. He was hard-working and kind-hearted, 
but the perpetual divorce between thought and action, which 
his position made inevitable, was constantly blunting and 
weakening all he did. His whole life, indeed, was one 
long waste of power, simply for lack of an elementary frank¬ 
ness.' 

But if these became Robert’s views as to Vernon, Vernon’s 
feeling toward Elsmere after six weeks’ acquaintance was not 
less decided. He was constitutionally timid, and he probably 
divined in his new helper a man of no ordinary caliber, whose 
influence might very well turn out some day to be of the “ in¬ 
calculably diffusive ” kind. He grew uncomfortable, begged 
Elsmere to beware of any “ direct religious teaching,” talked 
in warm praise of a “ policy of omissions,” and in equally warm 
denunciation of “ an^^thing like a policy of attack.” In short, 
it became plain that two men so much alike, and yet so differ¬ 
ent, could not long co-operate. 

However, just as the fact was being brought home to Els¬ 
mere, a friendly chance intervened. 

Hugh Flaxman, the Leyburns’ new acquaintance and Lady 
Helen’s brother, had been drawn to Elsmere at first sight ; and 
a meeting or two, now at Lady Charlotte’s, now at the Ley- 
burns’, had led both men far on the way to a friendship. Of 
Hugh Flaxman himself more hereafter. At present all that 
need be recorded is that it was at Mr. Flaxman’s house, over¬ 
looking St. James’s Park, Robert first met a man who was to 
give him the opening for which he was looking. 

Mr. Flaxman was fond of breakfast-parties d la Rogers, and 
on the first occasion when Robert could be induced to attend 
one of these functions, he saw opposite to him what he supposed 


ROBEllT EL8MEliE. 


453 


to be a lad of twenty, a young slip of a fellow, whose sallies of 
fun and invincible good-humor attracted him greatly. 

Sparkling brown eyes, full lips rich in humor and pugnacity, 
“ lockes crull as they were layde in presse,” the same look of 
wonderly ” activit}^, too, in spite of his short stature and 
dainty make, as Chaucer lends his squire—the type was so fresh 
and pleasing that Robert was more and more held by it, espec¬ 
ially when he discovered to his bewilderment that the supposed 
stripling must be from his talk a man quite as old as himself, 
an official besides, filling what was clearly some important place 
in the Avorld. lie took his full share in the politics and litera¬ 
ture started at the table, and presently, when conversation fell 
on the proposed municipality for London, said things to which 
the whole party listened. Robert’s curiosity was aroused, and 
after breakfast he questioned his host and was promptly intro¬ 
duced to “ Mr. Murray Edwardes.” 

Whereupon it turned out that tliis baby-faced sage was filling 
a post, in the work of which perhaps few people in London 
could have taken so much interest as Robert Elsmere. 

Fifty years before a wealth}^ merchant who had been one of 
the chief pillars of London Unitarianism had made his will and 
died. Ilis great warehouses lay in one of the eastern riverside 
districts of the city, and in his will he endeavored to do some¬ 
thing according to his lights for the place in which he had 
amassed his money. He left a fairly large bequest wherewith 
to build and endow a Unitarian chapel and found certain Uni¬ 
tarian charities, in the heart of what was even then one of the 
densest and most poverty-stricken of London parishes. Fora 
long time, however, chapel and charities seemed likely to rank 
as one of the idle freaks of religious wealth and nothing more. 
Unitarianism of the old sort is perhaps the most illogical creed 
that exists, and certainly it has never been the creed of the 
poor. In old days it required the presence of a certain arid 
stratum of the middle classes to live and thrive at all. This 

stratum was not to be found in R-, which rejoiced instead 

in the most squalid types of poverty and crime, types where¬ 
with the mild, shriveled Unitarian minister had about as much 
power of grappling as a poet laureate with a Trafalgar Square 
Socialist. 

Soon after the erection of the chapel, there arose that shaking 
of the dry bones of religious England which we call the Trac- 

tarian movement. For many years the new force left R- 

quite undisturbed. The parish church droned away, the Uni¬ 
tarian minister preached decorously to empty benches, know¬ 
ing nothing of the agitations outside. At last, however, toward 



454 


BOBEUT ELBMEBE. 


the end of the old minister’s life, a powerful church of the new 
type, stalfed hy friends and piii)ils of Pusey, rose in the center 

of R-, and the little Unitarian chapel was for a time more 

Buuifed out than ever, a fate which this time it shared dismally 
with the parish church. As generally happened, however, in 
those days, the proceedings at this new and splendid St. Wil¬ 
frid’s were not long in stirring up the Protestantism of the 
British rough—the said Protestantism being always one of the 
finest excuses for brickbats of which the modern cockney^' is 
master. The parish lapsed into a state of private war—the hec¬ 
tic clergy heading exasperated processions intoning defiant 
litanies on the side—mobs, rotten eggs, dead cats, and 
blatant Protestant orators on the other. 

The war went on practicall}^ for years, and while it was still 
raging the minister of the Unitarian chapel died, and the au¬ 
thorities concerned chose in his place a 3mung fellow, the son of 
a Bristol minister, a Cambridge man besides, as chance would 
have it, of brilliant attainments, and unusually commended 
from many quarters, even including some Church ones of the 
liberal kind. This curly-haired youth, as he Avas then in reality, 
and as to his own quaint vexation he went on seeming to be up 
to quite middle age, had the Avit to perceive at the moment of 
his entiy on the troubled scene that behind all the mere brutal, 
opposition to the neAV church, and in contrast Avith the sheer 
indifference of three-fourths of the district, there Avas a small 
party consisting of an aristocracy of the artisans, Avhose pro¬ 
test against the Puseyite doings Avas of a much quieter, sterner 
sort, and among Avhom the uproar had mainly roused a certain 
crude poAver of thinking. He threAV himself upon this element,, 
which he rather divined than discovered, and it responded.. 
He preached a simple creed, droA^'e it home by pure and gener¬ 
ous living ; and he lectured, taught, brought down Avorkers 
from the West End, and before he had been five years in har¬ 
ness had not only made himself a poAver in R-, but was be¬ 

ginning to be heard of and watched Avith no small interest 
by many outsiders. 

This Avas the man on Avhom Robert had now stumbled. Be¬ 
fore they had talked twenty minutes each Avas fascinated by 
the other. They said good-by to their host, and wandered out 
together into St. James’s Park, Avhere the trees were white Avith 
frost and an orange sun was struggling through the fog. Here 
Murra}^ Edwardes poured out the whole story of his ministiy 
to attentive ears. Robert listened eagerh^ Unitarianism Avas 
not a familiar subject of thought to him. He had never dreamed 
of joining the Unitarians, and AA'as indeed long ago convinced 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 


455 


that in the beliefs of a Channiiig no one once fairly started on 
the critical road could rationally stop. That common thinness 
and aridity, too, of the Unitarian temper had weighed with 
him. But here, in the person of Murray Edwardes, it was as 
though he saw something old and threadbare revivified. The 
young man’s creed, as he presented it, had grace, persuasive¬ 
ness, even unction, and there was something in his tone of 
mind whicli was like a fresh wind blowing over the fevered 
places of the other’s heart. 

They talked long and earnestly, Edwardes describing Ins 
own work, and the changes creeping over the modern Unitar¬ 
ian body, Elsmere saying little, asking much. 

At last the young man looked at Elsmere with eyes of bright 
decision. 

‘‘You can not work with the Church ! ” he said—“ it is im¬ 
possible. You will only wear yourself out in eiforts to restrain 
what you could do infinitely more good, as things stand now, 
by pouring out. Come to us—I will put you in the way. You 
shall be hampered by no pledges of any sort. Come and take 
the direction of some of my workers. We have all got our 
hands more than full. Your knowledge, your experience, 
would be invaluable. There is no other opening like it in 
England just now for men of your way of thinking and mine. 
Come ! Who knows what Ave may be putting our hands to— 
Avhat fruit may grow from the smallest seed ? ” 

The two men stopped beside the lightl}^ frozen Avater. Rob¬ 
ert gathered that in this soul, too, there had risen the same large 
intoxicating dream of a reorganized Christendom, a new 
Avide-spreading shelter of faith for discouraged, broAvbeaten 
man, as in his OAvn. “ I Avill,” he said briefly, after a pause, 
his own look kindling—“ it is the opening I have been 
pining for. I will give you all I can, and bless you for the 
chance.” 

That evening Robert got home late after a busj^ day full of 
various engagements. Mary, after some Avaiting up for 
“ Fader,” had just been carried protesting, red lips pouting, 
and fat legs kicking, off to bed. Catherine Avas straightening 
the room, which had been throAvn into confusion by the child’s 
romps. 

It was Avith an effort—for he knewitAvould be a shock to 
her —that he began to talk to her about the breakfast-party at 
Mr. Flaxman’s and his talk with Murray Edwardes. But he had 
made it a rule Avith himself to tell her everything that he was 
doing or meant to do. Slie Avould not let him tell her what he 


156 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


■was thinking. But as much openness as there could be between 
them, there should be. 

Catherine listened—still moving about the while—the thin, 
beautiful lips becoming more and more compressed. Yes, it 
was hard to her, very hard ; the people among whom she had 
been brought up, her father especially, would have held out 
the hand of fellowship to any body of Christian people, but not 
to the Unitarian. l^To real barrier of feeling divided them from 
any orthodox Dissenter, but the gulf between them and the 
Unitarian had been dug very deep by various forces—forces of 
thought originally, of strong habit and prejudice in the course 
of time. , 

He is going to work with them now,” she thought bitterly ; 

“ soon he will be one of them—perhaps a Unitarian minister 
himself.” 

And for the life of her, as he told his tale, she could find 
nothing but embarrassed monosyllables, and still more embar¬ 
rassed silences wlierewith to answer him. Till at last he, too, 
fell silent, feeling once more the sting of a now habitual dis¬ 
comfort. 

Presently, however, Catherine came to sit down beside him. 
She laid her head against his knee, saying nothing, but gather¬ 
ing his hand closely in both her own. 

Poor woman’s heart! One moment in rebellion, the next a 
suppliant. He bent down quickly and kissed her. 

“Would you like,” he said presently, after both had sat 
silent a while in the firelight, “ would you care to go to Madame 
de Uetteville’s to-night ? ” 

“ By all means,” said Catherine, with a sort of eagerness. 
“ It was Friday she asked us for, wasn’t it ? We will be quick 
over dinner, and I will go and dress.” 

In that last ten minutes which Robert had spent with the 
squire in his bedroom, on the Monday afternoon when they 
were to have walked, Mr. Wendover had diyly recommended 
Elsmere to cultivate Mme. de Netteville. He sat propped up 
in his chair, white, gaunt and C3niical, and this remark of his was 
almost the only reference he would allow to the Elsmere move. 

“ You had better go there,” he said huskih", “ it will do you 
good. She gets the first-rate people and she makes them talk, 
which Lady Charlotte can’t. Too many fools at Lady Char¬ 
lotte’s ; she Avaters the wine too much.” 

And he had persisted with the subject—using it, as Elsmei’e 
thought, as a means of warding off other conversation. He 
Avould not ask Elsmere’s plans, and he would not allow a word 
about himself. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


457 


There had been a heart attack, old Meyrick thought, coupled 
with signs of nervous strain and excitement. It was the last 
ailment which evidently troubled the doctor most. But, be¬ 
hind the physical breakdown, there was to Robert’s sense some¬ 
thing else, a spiritual something, infinitely forlorn and j^iteous, 
which revealed itself wholly against the elder man’s will, and 
filled the younger with a dumb, helpless rush of sympathy. 
Since his departure Robert had made the keeping up of his cor¬ 
respondence with the squire a binding obligation, and he was 
to-night chiefly anxious to go to Mme. de Netteville’s that he 
might writy an account of it to Mure well. 

. Still the squire’s talk, and his own glimpse of her at Mure- 
well, liad made him curious to see more of the woman herself. 
Tlie squire’s ways of describing her were always half approv¬ 
ing, half sarcastic. Robert sometimes imagined that he himself 
liad been at one time more under her spell than he cared to con¬ 
fess. If so it must have been when she was still in Paris, the 
young English widow of a man of old Frencli family, rich, fas¬ 
cinating, distinguished and the center of a small salon, 
admission to which was one of the social blue ribbons of 
Paris. 

Since the war of 1870 Mme. de Netteville had fixed her head¬ 
quarters in London, and it was to her house in Hans Place that 
the squire wrote to her about the Elsmeres. She owed Roger 
Wendover debts of various kinds, and she had an encouraging 
memory of the young clergyman on the terrace at Murewell. 
So she promptly left her cards, together with the intimation 
that she was at home always on Friday evenings. 

“ I have never seen the wife,” slie meditated, as her delicate 
jeweled hand drew up the window of her brougham in front 
of the Elsmeres’ lodgings. But if she is the ordinary country 
clergyman’s spouse, the squire of course will have given the 
young man a hint.” 

But whether from oblivion, or from some instinct of grim 
Iiumor toward Catherine, whom he had always vaguely dis¬ 
liked, the squire said not one word about his wife to Robert 
in the course of their talk of Mme. de Netteville. 

Catherine took pains with her dress, sorely wishing to do 
Robert credit. She put on one of the gowns she had taken to 
Murewell when she married. It was black, simply made, and 
had been a favorite with both of tliem in the old surroundings. 

So they drove off to Mme. de Netteville’s. Catherine’s heart 
was beating faster than usual as she mounted the twisting 
stairs of the luxurious little house. All these new social ex¬ 
periences were a trial to her. But she had tlie vaguest, most 


458 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


unsuspicious ideas of what she was to see in this particular 
house. 

A long, low room was thrown open to them. Unlike most 
English rooms, it was barely though richly furnished. A Per¬ 
sian carpet, of a self-colored grayish blue, threw the gilt French 
chairs and the various figures sitting upon them into delicate 
relief. The walls Avere painted white, and had a few French 
mirrors and girandoles upon them, half a dozen line French 
portraits, too, here and there, let into the wall in oval frames. 
The subdued light came from the white sides of the room,. 
and seemed to be there solely for social purposes. You could 
hardly have read or written in the room, but j^ou could see a^ 
beautiful woman in a beautiful dress there, and you could 
talk there, either tete-d-tete, or to the assembled company, to 
perfection, so cunningly Avas it all devised. 

When tlie Elsmeres entered there were about a dozen people^ 
present—ten gentlemen and two ladies. One of the ladies,, 
Mine, de Netteville, Avas lying back in the corner of a velvet 
divan placed against the Avail, a screen betAveen her and a- 
splendid fire that threw its blaze out into the room. The other,, 
a slim Avoman Avith closely curled fair hair, and a neck abnor¬ 
mally long and Avhite, sat near her, and the circle of men was; 
talking indiscriminately to both. 

As the footman announced Mr. and Mrs. Elsmere there Avas: 
a general stir of surprise. The men looked round ; Mine, de 
Netteville half rose with a puzzled look. It Avas more than a 
month since she had dropped her invitation. Then a flash,, 
not altogether of pleasure, passed over her face, and she said 
a feAV hasty Avords to the woman near her, adA^ancing the 
moment afterAvards to give her hand to Catherine. 

“ This is A^ery kind of you, Mrs. Elsmere, to remember me 
so soon. I had imagined you were hardly settled enough yet. 
to give me the pleasure of seeing you.” 

But the eyes fixed on Catherine, eyes Avhich took in every¬ 
thing, Avere not cordial, for all their smile. 

Catherine, looking up at her, was overpoAvered by her exces- 
siYe manner, and by the Avoman’s look of conscious, sarcastic 
strength, struggling through all the outer softness of beauty 
and exquisite dress. 

‘‘Mr. Elsmere, you Avill find this room almost as hot, I am 
afraid, as that afternoon on which Ave met last. Let me intro¬ 
duce you to Count Wielandt—Mr. Elsmere. Mrs. Elsmere, 
Avill you come over here, beside Lady Aubrey Willert.” 

Robert found himself boAving to a young diplomatist, who 
seemed to him to look at him very much as he himself might 



ROBERT EL8MERE. 


459 


have scrutinized an inhabitant of New Guinea. Lady Aubrey 
made an imperceptible movement of the head as Catherine 
was presented to her, and Mine, de Netteville, smiling and 
biting her lip a little, fell back into her seat. 

There was a faint odor of smoke in the room. As Catherine 
sat down a young exquisite a few yards from her threw the 
end of a cigarette into the tire with a sharp, decided gesture. 
Lady Aubrey also pushed away a cigarette-case Avhich lay 
beside her hand. 

Everybody there had the air more or less of an habitue of 
the house; and when the conversation began again the Els- 
meres found it very hard, in spite of certain perfunctory eJfforts 
on the part of Mme. de Netteville, to take any share in it. 

“Well, I believe the story about Desforetsis true,” said the 
fair-haired young Apollo, who had thrown away his cigarette, 
lolling back in his chair. 

Catherine started, the little scene with Rose and Langham in 
the English rectory garden flashing incongruously back upon 
her. 

“ If you get it from the ‘ Ferret,’ my dear Evershed,” said 
the ex-Tory minister. Lord Rupert, “ you may put it down as 
a safe lie. As for me, I believe she has a much shrewder eye 
to the main chance.” 

“ What do you mean ? ” said the other, raising astonished 
eye-brows. 

“ Well it doesn’t you know, to write yourself down a 
flend—not quite.” 

“What—you think it will affect her audiences? Well, 
that is a good joke ! ” and the young man laughed immoder¬ 
ately, joined by several of the other guests. 

“ I don’t imagine it will make any difference to you, my 
good friend,” returned Lord Rupert, imperturbably; “ but the 
British public haven’t got your nerve. They may take it awk¬ 
wardly—I don’t say they will—when a woman who has turned 
her own young sister out-of-doors at night in St. Petersburg, 
so that ultimately as a consequence the girl dies, comes to 
ask them to clap her touching impersonations of injured 
virtue.” 

“ What has one to do with an actress’s private life, my dear 
Lord Rupert ? ” asked Mme. de Netteville, her voice slipping 
with a smooth clearness into the conversation, her eyes dart¬ 
ing light from under straight black brows. 

“ What, indeed ! ” said the young man who had begun the 
conversation, with a disagreeable enigmatical smile, stretching 
out his hand for another cigarette, and drawing it back with a 


460 


nOBmiT ELSMERE. 


look under Lis drooped eyelids—a look of cold, impertinent 
scrutiny—at Catherine Elsmere. 

“ Ah, well—I don’t want to be obtrusively moral—Heaven 
forbid ! But there is such a thing as destroying the illusion 
to such an extent that you injure your pocket. Desforets is 
doing it—doing it actually in Paris, too.” 

There mas a ripple of laughter. 

“ Paris and illusions —0 mon Dieu!"’’^ groaned young Ever- 
shed, when he had done laughing, laying meditative hands on 
his knees, and gazing into the fire. 

“ I tell you I have seen it,” said Lord Rupert, waxing com¬ 
bative, and slapping the leg he was nursing with emphasis. 
“ The last time I went to see Desforets in Paris the theater 
was crammed, and the house—theatrically speaking— ice. They 
received her in dead silence—they gave her not one single recall 
—and they only gave her a clap, that I can remember, at those 
tAvo or three points in the play where clap they positively 
must or burst. They go to see her—but they loathe her— 
and they let her know it.” 

“ Bah ! ” said his opponent, “ it is only because they are 
tired of her. Hei- vagaries don’t amuse them any longer— 
they knoAV them by heart. And—by George ! she has some 
pretty rivals, too, now ! ” he added reflectively—“ not to speak 
of the Bernhardt.” 

“ Well, the Parisians can be shocked,” said Count Wielandt 
in excellentEnglish, bending forward so as to get a good vieAv 
of his hostess. “ They are just now especially shocked by the 
condition of English morals.” 

The tAvinkle in his eye Avas irresistible. The men, under¬ 
standing his reference to the avidity AAnth Avhich certain Eng¬ 
lish aristocratic scandals had been lately seized upon by the 
French papers, laughed out—so did Lady Aubrey. Mme. de 
Netteville contented herself Avith a smile. 

“ They profess to be shocked, too, by Renan’s last book,” 
said the editor from the other side of the room. 

“ Dear me ! ” said Lady Aubrey, with meditative scorn, fan¬ 
ning herself lightly the Avhile, her thin but extraordinarily 
graceful head and neck thrown out against the golden brocade 
of the cushion behind her. 

Oh ! what so many of them feel in Renan’s case, of 
course,” said Mme. de *Netteville, “ is that every book he 
Avrites now give a fresh opening to the enemy to blaspheme. 
Your eminent freethinker can’t afford just yet, in the present 
state of the world, to make himself socially ridiculous. The 
cause suffers.” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


461 


Just my feeling,” said young Evershed, calmly. “ Tbougli 
I mayn’t care a rap about him personall}^-, I prefer that a man 
on my own front bench shouldn’t make a public ass of himself 
if he can help it—not for his sake, of course, but for mine ! ” 

Robert looked at Catherine. She sat upright by the side of 
Lady Aubrey ; her face, of which the beauty to-night seemed 
lost in rigidity, pale and stiff. With a contraction of heart he 
plunged himself into the conversation. On his road home that 
evening he found an important foreign telegram posted up at 
the small literary club to which he had belonged since Oxford 
days. He made a remark about it now to Count Wielandt; 
and the di})lomatist, turning rather unwillingly to face his 
questioner, recognized that the remark was a shrewd one. 

Presently the young man’s frank intelligence had told. On 
his way to and from tlie Holy Land three years before Robert 
had seen something of the East, and it so happened that he 
remembered the name of Count Wielandt as one of the foreign 
secretaries of legation present at an official party given by the 
English ambassador at Constantinople, which he and his 
mother had attended on their return journey, in virtue of a 
family connection with the ambassador. All that he could 
glean from memory lie made quick use of now, urged at first 
by the remorseful wish to make this new world into which he 
had brought Catherine less difficult than he knew it must have 
been during the last quarter of an hour. 

But after a while he found himself leading the talk of a 
section of the room, and getting excitement and pleasure out 
of the talk itself. Ever since that Eastern journey he had kept 
an eye on the subjects which had interested him then, reading 
in his rapid, voracious way all that came across him at Mure- 
well, especially in the squire’s foreign newspapers and reviews, 
and storing it when read in a remarkable memoiy. 

Catherine, after the failure of some conversational attempts 
between her and Mme. de IsTetteville, fell to watching her hus¬ 
band with a start of strangeness and surprise. She had scarcely 
seen him at Oxford among his equals ; and she had very rarely 
been present at his talks with the squire. In some ways, and 
owing to the instinctive reserves set up between them for so 
long, her intellectual knowledge of him was very imperfect. 
His ease, his resource, among these men of the world, for 
whom—independent of all else—she felt a countrywoman’s 
dislike, filled her with a kind of bewilderment. 

“ Are you new to London ? ” Lady Aubrey asked her pres¬ 
ently, in that tone of absolute detachment from the person 
addressed which certain women manage to perfection. She, 


462 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


too, had been watching the husband, and the sight had im¬ 
pressed her with a momentary curiosity to know what the stiff, 
handsome, dowdily dressed wife was made of. 

•‘We have been two months here,” said Catherine, her large 
gray eyes taking in her companion’s very bare shoulders, the 
costly, fantastic dress, and the diamonds flashing against the 
white skin. 

“ In what part ? ” 

“ In Bedford Square.” 

Lady Aubrej^' was silent. She had no ideas on the subject 
of Bedford Square at command. 

“We are very central,” said Catherine, feeling desperately 
that she was doing Robert no credit at all, and anxious to talk 
if only something could be found to talk about. 

“ Oh, yes, you are near the theaters,” said the other indif¬ 
ferently. 

This was hardly an aspect of the matter which had yet oc¬ 
curred to Catherine. A flash of bitterness ran through her. 
Had they left their Murewell life to be “ near the theaters,” 
and kept at arm’s-length by supercilious great ladies ? 

“We are very far from the park,” slie answered with an 
effort. “ I wish we weren’t, for my little girl’s sake.” 

“ Oh, you have a little girl ! How old ? ” 

“ Sixteen months.” 

“ Too young to be a nuisance yet. Mine are just old enough 
to be in everybody’s way. Children are out of place in Lon¬ 
don. I always want to leave mine in the country, but my 
husband objects,” said Lady Aubrey coolly. There was a cer¬ 
tain piquancy in saying frank things to this stiff, Madonna¬ 
faced woman. 

Mme. de Netteville, meanwhile, was keeping up a conversa¬ 
tion in an undertone with young Evershed, who had come to 
sit on a stool beside her, and was gazing up at her with eyes of 
which the expression was perfectly understood by several per¬ 
sons present. The handsome, dissipated, ill-conditioned youth 
had been her slave and shadow for the last two years. His 
devotion now no longer amused her, and she was endeavoring 
to get rid of it and liim. But the process was a difiicult one, 
and took both time and finesse. 

She kept her eye, notwithstanding, on the new-comers whom 
the squire’s introduction had brought to her that night. When 
the Elsineres rose to go, she said good-by to Catherine with 
an excessive politeness, under which her poor guest, conscious 
of her own gaucherie during the evening, felt the touch of 
satire she was perhaps meant to feel. But when Catherine 


liOBEliT EL8MERE. 


463 


was well ahead Mine, de Netteville gave Robert one of her 
most brilliant smiles. 

‘‘Friday evening, Mr. Elsmere ; always Fridays. You will 
remember ? ” 

The naivete of Robert’s social view, and the mobility of his 
temper, made him easily responsive. He had just enjoyed half 
an hour’s brilliant talk with two or three of the keenest and 
most accomplished men in Europe. Catherine had slipped out 
of his sight meanwhile, and the impression of their entree had 
been etfaced. He made Mme. de Netteville, therefore, a cor¬ 
dial, smiling reply before his tall, slender form disappeared 
after that of his wife. 

“ Agreeable—rather an acquisition!” said Mme. deNetteville 
to Lady Aubrey, with a light motion of the head toward Rob¬ 
ert’s retreating figure. “ But the wife! Good heavens! I owe 
Roger Wendover a grudge. I think he might have made it 
plain to those good people that I don’t want strange women at 
my Friday evenings.” 

Lady Aubrey laughed. “No doubt she is a genius, or a 
saint in mufti. She might be handsome too if some one would 
dress her.” 

Mme. de Netteville shrugged her shoulders. “ Oh! life is not 
long enough to penetrate that kind of person,” she said. 

Meanwhile the “person” was driving homeward very sad 
and ill at ease. She was vexed that she had not done better, 
and yet she was wounded at Robert’s enjojnnent. The Puri¬ 
tan in her blood was all aflame. As she sat looking into the 
motley lamplighted night, she could have “ testified ” like any 
prophetess of old. 

Robert meanwhile, his hand slipped into hers, was thinking 
of \Yielandt’s talk, and of some racy stories of Berlin celebrities 
told by a young attache who had joined their group. His lips 
were lightly smiling, his brow serene. 

But as he helped her down from the cab, and they stood in 
the hall together, he noticed the pale discomposure of her looks. 
Instantly the familiar dread and pain returned upon him. 

“Did you like it, Catherine? ”he asked her, with something 
like timidity, as they stood together by their bedroom fire. 

She sank into a low chair and sat a moment staring at the 
blaze. He was startled by her look of suffering, and kneeling, 
he put his arms tenderly round her. 

“ Oh, Robert, Robert! ” slie cried, falling on his neck. 

“ What is it ? ” he asked, kissing lier hair. 

“ I seem all at sea,” she said, in a choked voice, her face 
hidden—“the old landmarks swallowed up! I am alwaj^s 


464 


liOBEliT EL8MERE. 


judging and condemning—alwaj^s protesting. What am I that 
I should judge ! But how—how—can I lielp it?” 

She drew herself away from him, once more looking into the 
lire with drawn brows. 

“ Darling, the world is full of difference. Men and women 
take life in different ways. Don’t be so sure yours is the only 
right one.” 

He spoke with a moved gentleness, taking her hand the 
while. 

“ ‘ This'll the way, walk ye in it! ’” she said presently, with 
strong, almost stern emphasis. “ Oh, those Avomen, and that 
talk ! Hateful ! ” 

He rose and looked down on her from the mantel-piece. 
Within him was a movement of impatience, rej)ressed almost 
at once by the thought of that long night at Murewell. when 
he had vowed to himself to “ make amends ! ” 

And if that theory had not intervened she Avould still have 
disarmed him wholly. 

“Listen! ” she said to him suddenly, her eyes kindling with 
a strange, childish pleasure. Do you hear the Avind, the Avest 
Avind ? Do you remember hoAV it used to shake the house, how 
it used to come sweeping through the trees in the wood-path ? 
It must be trying the study AvindoAV nOAV, bloAving the vine 
against it.” 

A yearning passion breathed through eveiy feature. It 
seemed to him she saAV nothing before her. Her longing soul 
Avas back in the old haunts, surrounded by the old loA^ed forms 
and sounds. It Avent to his heart. He tried to soothe her with 
the tenderest words remorseful love could find. But the con¬ 
flict of feeling—grief, rebellion, doubt, self-judgment—would 
not be soothed, and long after she had made him leaA^e her and 
he had fallen asleep, she knelt on, a Avhite and rigid figure in 
the dying firelight, the Avind shaking the old house, the eternal 
murmur of London booming outside. 

CHAPTER XXXIV. 

Meanavhii.e, as if to complete the circle of pain with which 
poor Catherine’s life was compassed, it began to be plain to her 
that, in spite of the hard and mocking tone Rose generally 
adopted with regard to him, Edward Langham Avas constantly 
at the house in LerAvick Gardens, and that it Avas impossible 
he should be there so much unless in some Avay or other Rose 
encouraged it. 

The idea of such a marriage—nay, of such a friendship—Avas 
naturally as repugnant as ever to her. It had been one of the 


ROBERT ELSMERE, 


465 


bitterest moments of a bitter time when, at their first meeting 
after the crisis in her life, Langham, conscious of a sudden 
movement of pity for a woman he disliked, liad pressed the 
hand she held out to him in a way which clearly showed her 
what was in his mind, and had then passed on to chat and 
smoke with Robert in the study, leaving her behind to realize 
the gulf that lay between the present and that visit of his to 
Murewell, when Robert and she had felt in unison toward him, 
his opinions, and his conduct to Rose, as toward everything 
else of importance in their life. 

Now it seemed to her Robert must necessaril}'' look at the 
matter differently, and she could not make up her mind to talk 
to him about it. In reality, his objections had never had the 
same basis as hers, and he would have given her as strong a 
support as ever if she had asked for it. But she held her 
peace, and he, absorbed in other things, took no notice. Be¬ 
sides, he knew Langham too well. He had never been able 
to take Catherine’s alarms seriousl}". 

An attentive on-looker, however, would have admitted that 
this time, at any rate, tliey had their justification. Why Lang¬ 
ham was so much in the Leyburns’ drawing-room during these 
winter months wasa question which several people asked—him¬ 
self not least. He had not only pretended to forget Rose Ley- 
burn during the eighteen months wliich had passed since their 
first acquaintance at JMurewell—he had for all practical pur¬ 
poses forgotten her. It is only a small proportion of men and 
Avomen who are capable of passion on the great scale at all; 
and certainly, as Ave have tried to show, Langham was not 
among them. He had had a passing moment of excitement at 
MureAvell, soon put down, and followed b}^ a week of extremely 
pleasant sensations, Avhich, like most of his pleasures, had 
ended in reaction and self-abhorrence. He had left Murewell 
remorseful, melancholy, and ill at ease, but conscious, certain¬ 
ly, of a great relief that he and Rose Leyburii Avere not likely 
to meet again for long. 

Then his settlement in London had absorbed him, as all such 
matters absorb men who have become the slaves of their OAvn 
solitary habits, and in the joy of his new freedom, and the 
fresh zest for learning it had aroused in him, the beautiful, un¬ 
manageable child Avho had disturbed his peace at Murewell was 
not likely to be more, but less, remembered. When he stum¬ 
bled across her unexpectedly in the National Gallery, his de¬ 
termining impulse had been merely one of flight. 

However, as he had written to Robert tOAvard tlie beginning 
of his London residence, there Avas no doubt that Ids migration 


466 


nOBEBT ELSMERE. 


liad made him for the time much more human, observant, and 
accessible. Oxford had become to him an oppression and a 
iiiglitmare, and as soon as lie had turned his back on it his men¬ 
tal lungs seemed once more to fill with air. He took his mod¬ 
est part in the life of the capital ; happy in the obscurity 
afforded him by the crowd ; rejoicing in tlie thought that his 
life and his affairs were once more his own, and the academical 
yoke had been slipped forever. 

It was in this mood of greater cheerfulness and energy that 
his fresh sight of Rose found liim. For the moment, he was 
perhaps more susceptible than he ever could have been before 
to her young perfections, her beauty, her brilliancy, her pro¬ 
voking stimulating ways. Certainly, from that first afternoon 
onward he became more and more restless to watch her, to be 
near her, to see what she made of herself and her gifts. In 
general, though it was certainly owing to her that he came so 
much, she took small notice of him. He regarded, or chose to 
regard, himself as a mere “ item ”—something systematically 
overlooked and forgotten in the bustle of her days and nights, 
ile saw that she thought badly of him, that the friendship he 
might have had was now proudly refused him, that their first 
week together had left a deep impression of resentment and 
hostility in her mind. And all the same he came; and she asked 
him ! And sometimes, after an hour when she had been more 
difficult or more satirical than usual, ending notwithstanding 
with a little change of tone, a careless “You will find us next 
Wednesday as usual ; So-and-so is coming to play,” Langham 
would, walk home in a state of feeling he did not care to ana¬ 
lyze, but which certainly quickened the pace of life a good 
deal. She would not let him try his luck at friendship again, 
but in the strangest, slightest ways did she not make him sus¬ 
pect every now awd then that he was in some sort important 
to her, that he sometimes preoccupied her against her will ; 
that her will indeed sometimes escaped her, and failed to con¬ 
trol her manner to him ? 

It was not only his relations to the beauty, however, his in¬ 
terest in her career, or his perpetual consciousness of Mrs. Els- 
mei-e’s cold dislike andclisapproval of his presence in her moth¬ 
er’s drawing-room, that accounted for Langham’s heightened 
mental temperature this winter. The existence of the proceed¬ 
ings of Mr. Hugh Flaxman had a very considerable share in it. 

“ Tell me about Mr. Langham,” said Mr. Flaxman once to 
Agnes Leyburn, in the early da3^s of his acquaintance with the 
family; “ is he an old friend ? ” 

“Of Robert’s,” replied Agnes, her cheerful, impenetrable 


ROBERT ELT>MERE. 


467 


look fixed i^pon the speaker. “ My sister met him once for a 
week in the countiy at the Elsmeres’. My mother and I have 
been only introduced to him.” 

Hugh Flaxman pondered the information a little. 

“ Hoes he strike you as—well—what shall we say ?—un¬ 
usual.? ” 

His smile struck one out of her. 

“ Even Robert might admit that,” she said demurely. 

“ Is Elsmere so attached to him ? I own I was provoked just 
now by his tone about Elsmere. I was remarking on the evi¬ 
dent pliysical and mental strain your brother-in-law had gone 
through, and he said, with a nonchalance I can not.convey : 
‘‘ Yes, it is astonishing Elsmere should have ventured it. I 
confess I often wonder whether it was worth while.’ ‘ Wh}^ ? ’ 
said I, perhaps a little hotly. AYell, he didn’t know—wouldn’t 
say. But I gathered that, according to him, Elsmere is still 
swathed in such an unconscionable amount of religion that the 
few rags and patches he has got rid of are hardly worth the 
discomfort of the change. It seemed to me the tone of the 
very cool spectator, rather than the friend. However—does 
your sister like him ? ” 

“ I don’t know,” said Agnes, looking her questioner full in 
the face. 

Hugh Flaxman’s fair complexion flushed a little. He got up 
to go. ^ 

“ He is one of the most extraordinarily handsome persons I 
ever saw,” he remarked, as he buttoned up liis coat. “ Don’t 
you think so ? ” 

“ Yes,” said Agnes dubiously, if he didn’t stoop, and if he 
didn’t in general look half asleep.” 

Hugh Flaxman departed more puzzled than ever as to the 
reason for the constant attendance of this uncomfortable anti¬ 
social person at the Leyburns’ house. Being himself a man of 
very subtle and fastidious tastes, he could imagine that so 
original a suitor, with such eyes, such an intellectual reputa- 
tation so well sustained by scantiness of speech and the most 
picturesque ca2)acity for silence, might have attractions for a 
romantic and willful girl. But where were the signs of it ? 
Rose rarely talked to him, and was always ready to make him 
the target of a sub-acid raillery. Agnes was clearly indifferent 
to him, and Mrs. Leyburn equally clearly afraid of him. Mrs. 
Elsmere, too, seemed to dislike him, and yet there he was 
week after week. Flaxman could not make it out. 

Then he tried to explore the man himself. He started vari¬ 
ous topics with liim—university reform, politics, music. In 


468 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


vain. In the moat characteristic Oxford da^^s La^ghain had 
never assumed a more wholesale ignorance of all subjects in 
heaven or earth, and never stuck more pertinaciously to the 
flattest forms of commonplace, Flaxman walked away at last 
boiling over. The man of pai’ts masquerading as the fool is 
perhaps at least as exasperating as the fool playing at wisdom. 

However, he was not the only person irritated. After one of 
these fragments of conversation Langham also walked rapidly 
home in a state of most irrational j^etulance, his hands thrust 
with energy into the pockets of his overcoat. 

“ No, my successful aristocrat, you shall not have every¬ 
thing your own way so easily with me or with her ! You may 
break me, but you shall not play upon me. And as for her, I 
will see it out—I will see it out! ” 

And he stiffened himself as he walked, feeling life electric 
all about him, and a strange new force tingling in every vein. 

Meanwhile, however, Mr. Flaxman was certainly having a 
good deal of his own way. Since the moment when his aunt. 
Lady Charlotte, had introduced him to Miss Leyburn—watch¬ 
ing him the while with a half smile which soon broadened into 
one of sly triumph—Hugh Flaxman had persuaded himself that 
country houses are intolerable even in the shooting season, and 
that London is the only place of residence during the Avinter 
for the man who aspires to govern his life on principles of rea¬ 
son. Through his influence and that of his aunt. Hose and 
Agnes—Mrs. Leyburn never went out—were being carried into 
all the high life that London can supply in November and 
January. Wealthy, high-born, and popular, he was gradually 
devoting his advantages in the freest way to Rose’s service. 
He was an excellent musical amateur, and he was always proud 
to play with her; he had a fine country house, and the little 
rooms on Carnpden Hill were almost always filled with flowers 
from his gardens ; he had a famous musical library, and its 
treasures were lavished on the girl violinist ; he had a singu¬ 
larly large circle of friends, and with his whimsical energy he 
was soon inclined to make kindness to the two sisters the one 
test of a friend’s good will. 

He Avas clearly touched by Rose; and what was to prevent his 
making an impression on her ? To her sex he had always been 
singularly attractive. Like his sister, he had all sorts of bright 
impulses and audacities flashing and darting about him. He 
had ajcertain hauteur Avith men, and could play the aristocrat 
Avhen he pleased, for all his philosophical radicalism. But Avith 
women he was the most delightful mixture of deference and 
high spirits. He loved the grace of them, the daintiness of 


ROBERT ELISyiERE. 


409 


their dress, the softness of their voices. He would have done 
anything to please them, anything to save them pain. At 
twenty-five, when he was still ‘‘ Citizen Flaxman ” to his col¬ 
lege friends, and in the first fervors of a poetic defiance of 
prejudice and convention, he had married a gamekeeper’s 
pretty daughter. She had died with her child—died, almost, 
poor thing! of happiness and excitement—of the overgreatness 
of heaven’s boon to her. Flaxman had adored her, and death 
had tenderly embalmed a sentiment to which life might possi¬ 
bly have been less kind. Since then he had lived in music, let¬ 
ters, and society, refusing out of a certain fastidiousness to 
enter politics, but welcomed and considered wherever he went, 
tall, good-looking, distinguished, one of the most agreeable and 
courted of men, and perhaps tlie richest in London. 

Still, in spite of it all, Langham held his ground—Langham 
would see it out! And indeed Flaxman’s footing with the beauty 
was by no means clear—least of all to himself. She evidently 
liked him, but she bantered liim a good deal; she would not be 
the least subdued or dazzled b}’’ his birth or wealth, or b}^ 
those of his friends ; and if she allowed him to provide her 
with pleasures, she would hardly ever take his advice, or 
knowingly consult his tastes. 

Meanwhile slie tormented them both a good deal by the 
artistic acquaintance she gathered about her. Mrs. Pierson’s 
world, as we have said, contained a good many dubious odds 
and ends, and she had handed them all over to Rose. The Ley- 
burns’ growing intimacy with Mr. Flaxman and his circle, and 
through them with the finer types of the artistic life, would 
naturally and by degrees have carried them away somewhat 
from this earlier circle if Rose would have allowed it. But she 
clung persistently to its most unpromising specimens partly 
out of a natural generosity of feeling, but partly also for the 
sake of that opposition her soul loved, her poor, sickly soul, 
full under all her gayety and indifference of the most desper¬ 
ate doubt and soreness—opposition to Catherine, opposition to 
Mr. Flaxman, but above all, opposition to Langham. 

Flaxman could often avenge himself on her—or rather on 
the more obnoxious members of her following—by dint of a 
faculty for light and stinging repartee, which would send her 
flushed and biting her lips, to have her laugh out in private. 
But Langham for a long time was defenseless. Many of her 
friends in his opinion were simply pathological curiosites— 
their vanity Avas so frenzied, their sensibilities so morbidly de¬ 
veloped. He felt a doctor’s interest in them coupled Avith 
more than a doctor’s skepticism as to all they had to say about 


470 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


themselves. But Rose would invite them, would assume a 
y^^as^-intimacy with them ; and Langham as well as every¬ 
body else had to put up with it. 

Even the trodden worm, however— And the came a time 
when the concentration of a good many different lines of feel¬ 
ing in Langham’s mind betrayed itself at last in a sharp and 
sudden openness. It began to seem to him that she was 
specially bent often on tormenting him by the caprices of 
hers, and he vowed to himself hnally, with an outburst of irri¬ 
tation due in reality to a hundred causes, that he would assert 
himself, that he would make an effort at any rate to save her 
from her own follies. 

One afternoon, at a crowded musical party, to which he had 
come much against his will, and only in obedience to a com¬ 
pulsion he dared not analyze, she asked him in passing if he 
would kindly find Mr. MacFadden, a bass singer, whose name 
stood next on the programme, and who was not to be seen in 
the drawing-room. 

Langham searched the dining-room and the hall, and at. last 
found Mr. MacFadden—a fair, flabby, unwholesome youth— 
in the little study or cloak-room, in a state of collapse— 
flanked by whisky and water, and attended by two frightened 
maids, who handed over their charge to Langham and fled. 

Then it appeared that the great man had been offended by a 
change in the programme, which hurt his vanity, had with¬ 
drawn from the drawing-room on the brink of h3"sterics, had 
called for spirits, which had been provided for him with great 
difficulty by Mrs. Lejffiurn’s maids, and was there drinking 
himself into a state of rage and rampant dignity wdiich would 
soon have shown itself in a melodramatic return to the draw¬ 
ing-room, and a public refusal to sing at all in a house where 
art had been outraged in his person. 

Some of the old disciplinary instincts of the Oxford tutor 
awoke in Langham at the sight of the creature, and, with a 
prompt sternness which amazed himself, and nearly set Mac¬ 
Fadden whimpering, he got rid of the man, shut the hall door 
on him, and went back to the drawing-room. 

“ Well ? ” said Rose, in anxiety, coming up to him. 

“I have sent him awa^",” he said, briefly, an eye of unusual 
quickness and brightness looking down upon her; “ he was in 
no condition to sing. He chose to be offended, apparently, 
because he was put out of his turn, and has been giving the 
servants trouble.” 

Rose flushed deeply, and drew herself up with a look half 
trouble, half defiance, at Langham. 


nOBERT EL8MERE, 


471 


“I trust you will not ask him again,” he said, with the 
same decision. “ And if I might say so, there are one or two 
people still here whom I should like to see you exclude at the 
same time.” 

They had withdrawn into the bow-window out of ear-shot of 
the rest of the room. Langham’s look turned significantly to¬ 
ward a group near the piano. It contained one or two men 
whom he regarded as belonging to a low type ; men who, if it 
suited their purpose, would be quite ready to tell or invent 
malicious stories of the girl they were now flattering, and 
whose standards and instincts represented a coarser world than 
Rose in reality knew anything about. 

Her ej^es followed his. 

“ I know,” she said, petulantly, “ that you dislike artists. 
They are not your world. They are mine.” 

“ I dislike artists ? What nonsense, too ! To me personally 
these men’s ways don’t matter in the least. They go their 
road and I mine. But I deeply resent any danger of discom¬ 
fort and annoyance to jmu ? ” 

He still stood frowning, aglow of indignant energy showing 
itself in his attitude, his glance. She could not know that he 
was at that moment vividly realizing the drunken scene tliat 
might have taken place in her presence if he had not suc¬ 
ceeded in getting that man safely out of the house. But 
she felt that he was angry, and mostly angry with her, 
and there was something so piquant and unexpected in his 
anger ! 

“ I am afraid,” she said, with a queer sudden submissiveness, 
“you have been going through something very disagreeable. 
I am very sorry. Is4t my fault ? ” she added, with a whimsi¬ 
cal flash of eye, half fun, half serious. 

He could hardly believe his ears. 

“ Yes, it is your fault, I think ! ” he answered her, amazed 
at his own boldness. “Not that I was annoyed—heavens! 
what does that matter ?—but that you and your mother and 
sister were very near an unpleasant scene. You will not take 
advice. Miss Leyburn—you will take your own way in spite of 
what any one else can say or hint to you, and some day you 
will expose yourself to annoyance when there is no one near to 
protect you! ” 

“ Well, if so, it won’t be for want of a mentor,” she said, 
dropping him a mock curtsey. But her lip trembled under 
its smile, and her tone had not lost its gentleness. 

At that moment Mr. Flaxman, who had gradually estab¬ 
lished himself as the joint leader of these musical after- 


472 


ROBERT EL8MERE.* 


noons, came forward to summon Rose to a quartet. He looked 
from one to tlie other, a little surprise penetrating through 
his suavity of manner. 

“ Am I interrupting you ? ” 

“ Not at all,” said Rose ; then, turning back to Langham, 
she said, in a hurried whisper : “ Don’t say anything about the 
wretched man ; it would make mamma nervous, lie sha’n’t 
come here again.” 

Mr. Flaxman waited till the whisper was over, and then led 
her olf, with a change of manner which she immediately per¬ 
ceived, and which lasted for the rest of the evening. 

Langham went home, and sat brooding over the lire. Her 
voice had not been so kind, her look so womanhq for months. 
Had she been reading “ Shirley,” and would she have liked 
him to play Louis Moore ? He went into a lit of silent, con¬ 
vulsive laughter as the idea occurred to him. 

Some secret instinct made him keep away from her for a 
time. At last, one Friday afternoon, as he emerged from the 
Museum, where he had been collating the MSS. of some ob¬ 
scure Alexandrian, the old craving returned with added 
strength, and he turned involuntarily westward. 

An acquaintance of his, recently made in the course of work 
at the Museum, a young Russian professor, ran after him, and 
walked with him. Presently they passed a poster on the wall, 
which contained in enormous letters the announcement of 
Mine. Desforets’s approaching visit to London, a list of plays, 
and the dates of performances. 

The young Russian suddenly stopped and stood pointing at 
the advertisement, with shaking, derisive finger, his eyes 
aflame, the whole man quivering with what looked like antago¬ 
nism and hate. 

Then he broke into a fierce flood of French. Langham 
listened till they passed Piccadilly, passed the park, and till 
the young savant turned southward toward his Brompton 
lodgings. 

Then Langham slowly climbed Campden Hill, meditating. 
His thoughts were an odd mixture of the things he had just 
heard, and of a scene at Murewell long ago when a girl had 
denounced him for “ calumny.” 

At the door of Lerwick Gardens he was infermed that Mrs. 
Leyburn was upstairs with an attack of bronchitis. But the 
servant thought the young ladies were at home. Would he 
come in ? lie stood irresolute a moment, then went in on a 
jiretext of “ inquiry.” 

The maid threAv open the drawing-room door, and there was 


ROBEliT ELSMERE. 


473 


Rose sitting well into the fire—for it was a raw February 
afternoon—with a book. 

She received him with all her old hard brightness. He was, 
indeed, instantly sorry that he had made his way in. Tyrant! 
was she displeased because he had slipped his chain for rather 
longer than usual ? 

However, he sat down, delivered his book, and then talked 
first about her mother’s illness. They had been anxious, she 
said, but tlie doctor, who had just taken his departure, had now 
completely reassured them. 

“ Then you will be able probably afte«* all to put it in an 
appearance at Lady Charlotte’s this evening?” he asked her. 

The omnivorous Lad}^ Charfotte of course had made ac¬ 
quaintance with him in the Leyburns’ drawing-room, as she did 
with everybody who crossed her path, and three days before 
he had received a card from her for tins evening. 

“Oh, yes ! But I have had to miss a rehearsal this afternoon. 
That concert at Searle House is becoming a great nuisance.” 

“It will be a brilliant alfair, I suppose, Princes on one side 
of you—and Albani on the other. I see they have given you 
the most conspicuous part as violinist.” 

“ Yes,” she said, with a little satirical tightening of the lip. 
“ Yes—I suppose I ought to be much flattered.” 

“ Of course,” he said, smiling, but embarrassed. “To many 
people you must be at this moment one of the most enviable 
persons in the world. A delightful art—and every opportunity 
to make it tell ! ” 

There was a pause. She looked into the fire. 

“I don’t know whether it is a delightful art,” she said, 
presently, stifling a little yawn. “I believe I am getting very 
tired of London. Sometimes I think I shouldn’t be very sony 
to find myself suddenly spirited back to Burwood ! ” 

Langharn gave vent to some incredulous interjection. He 
had apparently surprised her in a fit of ennui which was rare 
with her. 

“ Oh, no, not yet ! ” she said suddenly, with a return of 
animation. “Madame Desforets comes next week, and I am 
to see her.” She drew herself up and turned a beaming face 
upon him. Was there a shaft of mischief in her eye ? He 
could not tell. The fire-light was perplexing. 

“You are to see her?” he said slowly. “Is she coming 
here ? ” 

“I hope so. Mrs. Pierson is to bring her. I want mamma 
to liave the amusement of seeing lier. My artistic friends are 
a kind of tonic to her—they excite her so much. She regards 


4V4 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


them as a sort of show—much as you do, in fact only in a 
more charitable fashion.” 

But he took no notice of what she was saying. 

‘‘ Madame Desforets is coming here ? ” he sharply repeated, 
bending forward, a curious accent in his tone. 

“ Yes ! ” she replied, with apparent surprise. Then, with a 
careless smile : “ Oh, I remember when we were at Mure well,, 
you were exercised that we should know her. Well, Mr. Lang- 
ham, I told you then that you were only echoing unworthy gos¬ 
sip. I am in the same mind still. I have seen her, and you 
haven’t. To me she is the greatest actress in the woi’ld, and, 
an ill-used woman to boot! ” 

Her tone had warmed with* every sentence. It struck him 
that she had willfully brought up the topic—that it gave her 
pleasure to quarrel with him. 

He put down his hat deliberately, got up, and stood with his. 
back to the fire. She looked up at him curiously. But the 
dark, regular face was almost hidden from her. 

“It is strange,” he said slowly, “ very strange—that you 
should have told me this at this moment ! Miss Ley burn, a 
great deal of the truth about Madam Desforets I could neither 
tell, nor could you hear. There are charges against her proved 
in open court, again and again, which I could not even men¬ 
tion in your presence. But one thing I can speak of. Do you 
know the story of the sister at St. Petersburg ? ” 

“ I know no stories against Madame Desforets,” said Rose- 
loftily, her quickened breath responding to the energy of his 
tone. “ I have always chosen not to know them.” 

“ The newspapers were full of this particular story just be¬ 
fore Christmas. I should have thought it must have reached 
you.” 

“ I did not see it,” she replied stifflj^ ; “ and I can not see 
what good purpose is to be served by your repeating it to me, 
Mr. Langham.” 

Langham could have smiled at her petulance, if he had not 
for once been determined and in earnest. 

“ You will let me tell it, I hope ?” he said quietly. “ I will 
tell it so that it shall not offend jonr ears. As it happens, I 
rnyself thought it incredible at the time. But, by an odd coin¬ 
cidence, it has just this afternoon been repeated to me bj^ a 
man who was an eye-witness of part of it.” 

Rose was silent. Her attitude was hauteur itseH, but she 
made no further active opposition. 

“ Three months ago,” he began, speaking with some difficulty 
but still with a suppressed force of feeling which ainazed his- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


475 


hearer, “ Madame Desfor^ts was acting in St. Petersburg. She 
liad with her a large company, and among them her own young 
sister, Elise Romney, a girl of eighteen. This girl had been 
always kept awa}” from Madame Desforets by her parents, who 
had never been sufficiently consoled by their eldest daughter’s 
artistic success for the infamy of her life.” 

Rose started indignantly. Langham gave her no time to 
speak. 

“ Elise Romney, however, had developed a passion for the 
stage. Her parents were respectable—and you know young 
girls in France are brought up strictly. She knew next to 
nothing of her sister’s escapades. But she knew that she was 
held to be the greatest actress in Europe—the photographs in 
the shops told her that she was beautiful. She conceived a ro¬ 
mantic passion for the woman whom she had first seen when 
she was a child of five, and actuated partly by this hungry 
affection, partl}^ by her own longing wish to become an actress, 
she escaped from home and joined Madame Desforets in the 
south of France. JMadame Desforets seems at first to have been 
pleased to have her. The girl’s adoration pleased her vanity. 
Her presence with her gave her new opportunities of posing. 
I believe,” and Langham gave a little dry laugh, they 
were photographed together at Marseilles with their arms 
round each other’s necks, and the photograph was an immense 
success. However, on the way to St. Petersburg, difficulties 
arose. Elise was pretty, in a blonde childish way, and she 
caught the attention of xX\^ jeune premier of the company, a 
man ”—the speaker became somewhat embarrassed—“ whom 
Madame Desforets seems to have regarded as her particular 
property. There were scenes at different towns on the journey. 
Elise became frightened—wanted to go home. But the elder 
sister, having begun tormenting her, seems to have determined 
to keep her hold on her, as a cat keeps and tortures a mouse— 
mainly for the sake of annojdng the man of whom she was 
jealous. They arrived at St. Petersburg in the depth of winter. 
The girl was worn out with traveling, unhappy, and ill. One 
night in Madame Desforets’s apartment there was a supper- 
party, and after it a horrible quarrel. No one exactly knows 
what happened. But towards twelve o’clock that night Ma¬ 
dame Desforets turned her young sister in evening dress, a 
light shawl round her, out into the snowy streets of St. Peters¬ 
burg, barred the door behind her, and revolver in hand dared 
the wretched man who had caused fracas to follow her.” 

Rose sat immovable. She had grown pale, but the firelight 
Avas not revealing. 


476 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Langham turned away from her toward the blaze, holding 
out his hands to it mechanically. 

“ The poor child,” he said after a pause, in a lower voice, 
“wandered about for some hours. It was a friglitful night— 
the great capital was quite strange to her. She was insulted— 
lied this way and that—grew benumbed with cold and terror, 
and was found unconscious in the early morning under the 
archway of a house some two miles from her sister’s lodgings.” 

There was a dead silence. Then Rose drew a long, quiver¬ 
ing breath. 

“ I do not believe it ! ” she said passionately. “ I can not 
believe it ! ” 

“ It was amply proved at the time,” said Langham dryly, 

“ though of course Madame Desforets tried to put her own 
color on it. But I told you I had private information. On 
one of the floors of the house where Elise Romney was picked 
up, lived a young university professor. He is editing an im¬ 
portant Greek text, and has lately had business at the Museum. 

I made friends with him there. He walked home with me 
this afternoon, saw the announcement of Madame Hesforets’s 
coming, and poured out the story. He and his wife nursed 
the unfortunate girl with devotion. Slie lived just a week, 
and died of inflammation of the lungs. I never in my life 
heard anjThing so pitiful as his description of her delirium, 
her terror, lier appeals, her shivering misery of cold.” 

There was a pause. 

“ She is not a woman,” he said presently, between his teeth. 
“ She is a wild beast.” 

Still there was silence, and still he held out his hand to the 
flame which Rose too was staring at. At last he turned 
round. “ I have told you a shocking story,” he said hurriedly. 
“ Perhaps I ought not to have done it. But, as you sat there 
talking so lightly, so gajdy, it suddenly became to me utterly 
intolerable that that woman should ever sit here in this room— 
talk to you—call you by your name—laugh with jmu—touch 
your liand ! Not even 3^111- willfulness shall cany jmu so far— 
you shall not do it! ” 

He hardly knew what he said. He was driven on by a pas¬ 
sionate sense of physical repulsion to the notion of any contact 
between her pure, fair youth, and something malodorous and 
corrupt. And there was, besides, a wild unique excitement in 
claiming for once to stay—to control her. 

Rose lifted her head slowl}^ The fire was bright. He saw 
the tears in her eyes, tears of intolerable pity for another girl’s 
awful stoiy. But through the tears something gleamed—a 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


477 


kind of exultation—the exultation which the magician feels 
when he has called spirits from the vasty deep, and after long 
doubt and difficult invocation they rise at last before his eyes. 

“ I will never see her again,” she said, in a low, wavering 
voice, but she, too, was hardly conscious of her own words. 
Their looks were on each other; the ruddy, capricious light 
touched her glowing cheeks, her straight-lined grace, her 
white hand. Suddenly from the gulf of another’s misery into 
Avhich they had both been looking there had sprung up, by 
the strange contrariety of human things, a heat and intoxica¬ 
tion of feeling, wrapping them round, blotting out the rest of 
the world from them like a golden mist. “ Be alwa3^s thus ! ” 
her parted lips, her liquid eyes were saying to him. His 
breath seemed to fail him ; he was lost in bewilderment. 

There were sounds outside—Catherine’s voice. He roused 
himself with a supreme effort. 

“ To-night—at Lady Charlotte’s ? ” 

‘‘ To-night,” she said, and held out her hand. .. , 

A sudden madness seized him—he stooped—his lips touched 
it—it was hastily drawn away, and the door opened. 

CHAPTER XXXV. 

‘‘ In the first place, my dear aunt,” said Mr. Flaxman, 
throwing himself back in his chair in front of Lady Charlotte’s 
drawing-room fire, “ you may spare your admonitions, because 
it is becoming more and more clear to me that, whatever my 
sentiments may be. Miss Leyburn never gives a serious 
thought to me.” 

He turned to look at his companion over his shoulder. His 
tone and manner were perfectly gay, and Lady Charlotte was 
puzzled by him. 

“ Stuff and nonsense ! ” replied the lady with her usual em¬ 
phasis ; “ I never flatter j’^ou, Hugh, and I don’t mean to begin 
now, but it would be mere folly not to recognize that you 
have advantages which must tell on the mind of any girl in 
Miss Le}"burn’s position.” 

Hugh Flaxman rose, and, standing before the fire with his 
hands in his pockets, made what seemed to be a close inspec¬ 
tion of his irreproachable trouser knees. 

I am sorry for your theory. Aunt Charlotte,” he said, still 
stooping, “ but Miss Leyburn doesn’t care twopence about my 
advantages.” 

“ Very proper of you to say so,” returned Lady Charlotte 
sharply; “ the remark, however, my good sir, does more credit 
to vour licart than to j^our head.” 


478 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


In the next place,” lie went on undisturbed, ‘‘ why you 
should have done your best this whole winter to throw Miss 
Leyburn and me together, if you meant in the end to oppose 
my manying her, I don’t quite see.” 

He looked up smiling. Lady Charlotte reddened ever so 
slightly. 

“ You know my weaknesses,” she said presentl^q with an 
effrontery which delighted her nephew. “ She is my latest 
novelty, she excites me, I can’t do without her. As to you, I 
can’t remember that you wanted much encouragement, but I 
acknowledge, after all these years of resistance—resistance to 
my most legitimate efforts to dispose of you—there was a 
certain piquancy in seeing you caught at last ! ” 

“ Upon my word ! ” he said, throwing back his head with a 
not very cordial laugh, in which, however, his aunt joined. She 
was sitting opposite to him, her powerful, loosely gloved hands 
crossed over the rich velvet of her dress, her fair large face 
and grayish hair surmounted by a mighty cap, as vigorous, 
shrewd, and individual a type of English middle age as could be 
found. The room behind her and the second and tliird drawing¬ 
rooms were brilliantly lighted. Mr. Wynnstay Avas enjoying a 
cigar in peace in the smoking-room, while his wife and nephew 
Avere awaiting the arrival of the evening’s guests upstairs. 

Lady Charlotte’s mind had been evidently much perturbed 
by the conversation Avith her nepheAV of Avhich AA^e are merel}^ 
describing the latter half. She Avas laboring under an uncom¬ 
fortable sense of being hoist Avith her OAvn petard—an uncom¬ 
fortable memory of a certain Avarning of her husband’s, deliv¬ 
ered at MureAA^ell. 

“ And noAAq” said Mr. Flaxman, ‘‘having confessed in so 
many words that you have done your best to bring me up to 
the fence, Avill you kindly recapitulate the arguments why in 
your opinion I should not jump it ? ” 

“Societ}^ amusement, flirtation, are one thing,” she replied, 
Avith judicial imperativeness, “ marriage is another. In these 
democratic days we must know everybody ; Ave should only 
marry our equals.” 

The instant, howcA^er, the words were out of her mouth, she 
regretted them. Mr. Flaxman’s expression changed. 

“ I do not agree with you,” he said, calmly, “ and you knoAv 
I do not. You could not, I imagine, have relied much upon 
that argument.” 

‘- Good gracious, Hugh ! ” cried Lady Charlotte crossly : 
“ you talk as if I Avere really the old campaigner some people 
suppose me to be. I have been amusing myself—T have liked 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


479 


to see you amused. And it is only tbe last few weeks since you 
have begun to devote yourself so tremendously, that I have 
come to take the thing seriously at all. I confess, if you like, 
that I have got you into the scrape—now 1 want to get you 
out of it ! I am not thin-skinned, but I hate family unpleas¬ 
antnesses—and you know what the duke will say.” 

“The duke be—translated ! ” said Fhixman coolly. “ Noth¬ 
ing of what you have said or could say on this point, my 
dear aunt, ha^ the smallest weight with Ine. But Provi¬ 
dence has been kinder to you and the duke than you deserve. 
Miss Leyburn does not care for me, and she does care—or I 
am very much mistaken—for somebody else.” 

He pronounced the words delibei’ately, watching their effect 
upon her. 

“ What, that Oxford nonentity, Mr. Langham, the Elsmeres* 
friend ? Ridiculous ; What attraction could a man of that 
type have for a girl of hers V ” 

“ I am not bound to supply an answer to that question,” 
re])lied her nephew. “ However, he is not a nonentity. Far 
from it ! Ten years ago, when I was leaving Cambridge, he 
was certainly one of tlie most distinguished of the young 
Oxford tutors.” 

“ Another instance of what universit}^ reputation is worth ! ” 
said Lady Charlotte scornfully. .It was clear that even in the 
case of a beauty Avhom slie thought it beneath him to marry, 
she was not pleased to see her nephew ousted by t\\Q force 
rnqjeure of a rival—and that a rival whom she regarded as an 
utter nobody, having neither marketable eccentricity, nor 
family, nor social brilliance to recommend him. 

Flaxman understood her jierplexity, and watched her with 
critical and amused eyes. 

“ I should like to know,” he said presently, with a curious 
slowness and suavity. “ I should greatly like to know Avhy 
you asked him here to-night ! ” 

“ You know perfectly well that I should ask anybod}^—a 
convict, a crossing-sweeper—if I happened to be half an hour 
in the same room with him ! ” 

Flaxman laughed. 

Well, it may be convenient to-night,” he said reflectively. 
“ AVhat are we to do—some thought-reading ? ” 

“ Yes, It isn’t a crush. I have only asked about thirty or 
forty people. Mr. Denman is to manage it.” 

She mentioned an amateur thought-reader greatly in request 
at the moment. 

Flaxman cogitated for a while, and then propounded 


480 


ROBFJIT ELSMERE. 


a little plan to liis aunt, to which she, after some demur, 
agreed. 

“I want to make a few notes,” he said dryly, when it was 
arranged ; “ I should be glad to satisfy myself.” 

When the IVIisses Leyburn were announced. Rose, though the 
younger, came in first. She always took the lead by a sort of 
natural right, and Agnes never dreamed of protesting. To¬ 
night the sisters were in white. Some soft creamy stuff M\as 
folded and draped about Rose’s slim, sha})ely'* figure in such a 
way as to bring out all its charming roundness and grace. Her 
neck and arms bore the challenge of the dress victoriously. Her 
red-gold hair gleamed in the light of Lady Charlotte’s innu¬ 
merable candles. A knot of dusky blue feathers on her shoul- 
dei', and a Japanese fan of the same color, gave just that touch 
of purpose and art which the spectator seems to claim as the 
tribute answering to his praise in the dress of a young girl. She 
moved with perfect self-possession, distributing a few smiling 
looks to the people she knew as she advanced toward Lady 
Charlotte. Any one with a discerning eye could have seen that 
she was in that stage of youth when a beautiful woman is like 
a statue to which the master is giving the finishing touches. 
Life, the sculptor, had been at work upon her, refining liere, 
softening there, planing away awkwardness, emphasizing grace, 
disengaging as it were, week by week, and month by month, 
all the beauty of which the original conception was capable. 
And the process is one attended always by a glow and sparkle, 
a kind of effluence of jmuth and pleasure, which makes beauty 
more beautiful and grace more graceful. 

The little murmur and rustle of persons turning to look, 
which had already begun to mark her entrance into a room, 
surrounded Rose as she walked up to Lady Charlotte. Mr. 
Llaxman, who had been standing absently silent, woke up 
directly she appeared, and went to greet her before his aunt. 

“You failed us at rehearsal,” he said, with smiling reproach; 
“ we were all at sixes and sevens.” 

“ I had a sick mother, unfortunately, who kept me at home. 
Lady Charlotte, Catherine coiddn’t come. Agnes and I am 
alone in the world. Will you chaperon us ? ” 

“ I don’t know whether I will accept the responsibility^ to¬ 
night—in that new gown,” replied Lady Charlotte grimly, 
])utting up her eye-glass to look at it and the wearer. Rose 
bore the scrutiny with a light, sniiling silence, even though she 
knew Mr. Flaxman was looking, too. 

“ On the contrary,” she said, “ one always feels so particu¬ 
larly good and prim in a new frock.” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


481 


‘‘ Really ? I should have thought it one of Satan’s likeliest 
moments,” said Flaxman, laughing—his eyes, however, the 
while quite saying other things to her, as they finished their 
inspection of her dress. 

Lady Charlotte threw a sharp glance first at him and then 
at Rose’s smiling ease, before she hurried off to other guests. 

‘‘ I have made a muddle as usual,” she said to herself in dis¬ 
gust, “ perhaps even a worse one than I thought ! ” 

AYhatever might be Hugh Flaxman’s state*of mind, however, 
he never showed greater self-possession than on this particular 
evening. 

A few minutes after Rose’s entry he introduced her for the 
first time to his sister. Lady Helen. The Varleys had only just 
come up to town for the opening of Parliament, and Lady 
Helen had come to-night to ^Martin Street, all ardor to see 
Hugh’s new adoration, and the girl whom all the world was be¬ 
ginning to talk about—both as a beauty and as an artist. She 
rushed at Rose, if any word so violent can be applied to any¬ 
thing so light and airy as Lady Helen’s movements, caught the 
girl’s hands in both hers, and, gazing up at her with undis¬ 
guised admiration, said to her the prettiest, daintiest, most 
effusive things possible. Rose—Mdio, with all her lithe shapeli¬ 
ness, looked over-tall and even a trifle stiff beside the tiny, bird¬ 
like Lady Helen—took the advances of Hugh Flaxman’s sister 
with a pretty flush of flattered pride. She looked down at 
the small, radiant creature with soft and friendly eyes, and 
Hugh Flaxman stood by, so far well pleased. 

Then he went off to fetch Mr. Denman, the hero of the even¬ 
ing, to be introduced to her. While he was away, Agnes, 
who was behind her sister, saw Rose’s eyes wandering from 
Lad}'’ Helen to the door, restlessly searching and then returning. 

Presently through the growing crowd round the entrance 
Agnes S})ied a well-known form emerging. 

“ JMr. Langharn ! But Rose never told me he was to be here 
to-night, and how dreadful he looks ! ” 

Agnes was so startled that her eyes followed Langharn closely 
across the room. Rose had seen him at once ; and they had 
greeted each other across the crowd. Agnes was absorbed, 
trying to analyze what had struck her so. The face was al¬ 
ways melancholy, always pale, but to-niglit it was ghastly, 
and from the whiteness of cheek and brow, the eyes, the jet- 
black hair stood out in intense and disagreeable relief. She 
would have remarked on it to Rose, but that Rose’s attention 
was claimed by the young thought-reader, Mr. Denman, whom 
Mr, Flaxman had brought uj). Mr. Denman was a fair-haired 


482 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


young Hercules, wliose tremulous, agitated manner contrasted 
oddly with his athlete’s looks. Among other magnetisms he 
M SiS clearl^^ open to the magnetism of women, and he sta^^ed 
talking to Rose, staring furtively at her the wliile from under 
his heavy lids—much longer than the girl thought fair. 

“ Have you seen an}^ experiments in the working of this new 
force before ? ” he asked her, with a solemnity whicli sat oddly 
on his common])lace bearded face. 

“ Oil, yes ! ” she said flippantly. We have tried it some¬ 
times. it is very good fun.” 

He drew himself up. “ Not fan,’’'' he said, impressively, 
“ not fun. Thought-reading wants seriousness ; the .most tre¬ 
mendous things depend upon it. If established it will revolu¬ 
tionize our whole views of life. Even a Huxley could not deny 
that ! ” 

She studied him with mocking eyes. “ Do you imagine this 
party to-night looks very serious?” 

His face fell. 

“ One can seldom get people to take it scientifically,” he 
admitted, sighing. Rose, impatiently, thought him a most 
preposterous young man. Why was he not cricketing, or 
shooting, or exploring, or using the muscles Nature had given 
him so amply, to soihe decent, practical purpose, instead of 
making a business out of ruining his own nerves and other 
people’s night after night in hot drawing-rooms ? And when 
would he go away ? 

“ Come, Mr Denman,” said Flaxman, laying hands upon 
him ; “ the audience is about collected, I think. Ah, there 3^11 
are ! ” and he gave Langham a cool greeting, “ Have you seen 
an3^thing j-et of these fashionable dealings with the devil?” 

“ Nothing. Are 3^11 a believer ?” 

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders. “ I never refuse an ex¬ 
periment of an3r kind,’’ he added, with an odd change of voice. 
“ Come, Denman.” 

And the two went off. Langham came to a stand beside 
Rose, while old Lord Rupert, as jovial as ever, and bubbling 
over with gossip about the queen’s speech, appropriated Lady 
Helen, who was the darling of all elderl3^ men. 

They did not speak. Rose sent him a ra3^ from e3^es full of 
a new divine sh3mess. He smiled gently in answer to it, and 
full of her own young emotion, and of the effort to conceal it 
from all the world, she noticed none of that change which had 
struck Agnes. 

And all the while, if she could have penetrated the man’s 
silence ! An hour before this moment Langham had vowed 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


483 


that nothing should take liiin to Lady Cliarlotte’s that niglit. 
And y^t here he was, riveted to lier side, alive like any nor¬ 
mal human being to every detail of her loveliiu'ss, shaken to 
his inmost being by the intoxicating message of her look, of 
the transformation which had passed in an instant over the 
teasing difticnlt, creature of the last few months.. 

At Mnrewell his chagrin had been not to feel, not to strug¬ 
gle, to have been cheated out of experience. 'Well here is the 
experience in good earnest ! And Langham is wrestling with 
it for dear life. And how little the ex(piisite child beside him 
knows of it, or of the man on whom she is spending her first 
willful pa.'^sion ! She stands strangel}^ exulting in her own 
strange victory over a life, a heart, which had defied and 
eluded her. The world throbs and thrills about her, the 
croAvd beside her is all unreal, the air is full of whisper, of ro¬ 
mance. 

The thought-reading folhnved its usual course. A murder 
and its detection were given in dumb show. Then it was the 
turn of card-guessing, bank-note finding, and the various other 
forms of tele])athic hide and seek. j\£r. Flaxman superin¬ 
tended them all, his restless eye wandering every other minute 
to the further drawing-room in which the lights had been low¬ 
ered, catching there aiwa3"s the same patch of black and white 
—Rose’s dress and the dark form beside her. 

“ Are you convinced ? Do ^"ou believe ?” said Rose, merrily 
looking u]) at her companion. 

“ In tele])ath3''? Well—so far—I have not got bej^ond the 
delicacy and ])erfection of Mr. Denman’s—muscular sensation. 
So much I am sui'e of ! ” 

‘‘ Oh, but va)ur ske[)ticism is ridiculous ! ” she said ga^dy. 
“ We knoio that some people have an extraordinary power 
over others.” 

“ Yes, that certainly we know ! ” lie answered, his voice 
dropping, an odd strained note in it. “ I grant x'ou that.” 

She trembled deliciousl}^ Her e^^elids fell. They stood to¬ 
gether, conscious only of each other. 

“ Now,” said ]\Ir. Denman, advancing to the doorway be¬ 
tween the two drawing-rooms, “ I have done all I can—I am 
exhausted. Rut let me beg of all to go on with some ex¬ 
periments amongst 3'ourselves. Every fresh discoveiy of this 
power in a new individual is a gain to science. I believe about 
one in ten has some share of it. IVlr. Flaxman and I will ar¬ 
range eveiything, if any one will volunteer?” 

''khe audience broke uj) into groiqis, laughing, chatting, 
suggesting this and that, presently Lady Charlotte’s loud 


484. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


dictatorial voice made itself heard, as she stood, eye-glass in 
hand, looking round the circle of her guests. 

“ Somebody must venture—we are losing time.” 

Then the eye-glass stopped at Rose, who was sitting, tall 
and radiant, on the sofa, her blue fan across her white knees, 
“ Miss Leyburn—you are always public-spirited—will you be 
victimized for the good of science ? ” 

The girl got up with a smile. 

“ And Mr. Langham—will you see what you can do with 
Miss Leyburn ? Hugh—we all choose her task, don’t we— 
then Mr. Langham wills ? ” 

Flaxnian came up to explain. Langham had turned to Rose 
—a wild fury with Lady Charlotte and the whole affair swee]»- 
ing through him. Rut there was no time to demur ; that 
judicial eye was on them ; the large figure and towering cap 
bent toward liim. Refusal was impossible. 

“ Command me ! ” he said, with a sudden straightening of 
the form and a flush on the pale cheek. ‘‘ I am afraid Miss 
Leyburn will find me a very bad partner.” 

“Well, now then !” said Flaxinan : “Miss Leyburn, will 
you please go down into the library while we settle what you 
are to do ? ” 

She went, and he held the door open for her. But she 
passed out unconscious of him—rosy, confused, her eyes bent 
on the ground. 

“Now, then, what shall Miss Leyburn do ?” asked Lady 
Charlotte^ in the same loud, emphatic tone. 

“If I might suggest something quite different from any¬ 
thing that has been yet tried,” said Mr. Flaxman, “suppose 
we require Miss Leyburn to kiss the hand of the little marble 
statue of Hope in the far drawing-room. What do you say, 
Langham ? ” 

“ What you please ! ” said Langham, moving up to him. A 
glance passed between the two men. In Langham’s there was 
a hardly sane antagonism and resentment, in Flaxman’s an 
excited intelligence. 

“ Now then,” said Flaxman coolly, “ fix your mind steadily 
on what Miss Leyburn is to do—you must take her hand—but 
except in thought, you must carefully follow and not lead her. 
Shall I call her?” 

Langham abruptly assented. He had a passionate sense of 
being watched—tricked. Why were he and she to be made a 
spectacle for this man and his friends ? A mad, irrational in¬ 
dignation surged through him. 

'riien she was led in blindfolded, one hand stretched out 


nOBERT ELSMERE. 


485 


feelinof tlie air in front of lier. The circle of people drew back. 
]SIr. Flaxnian and Mr. Denman prepared, note-book in hand, to 
watch the experiment. Langham moved desperately forward. 

But the instant her soft, trembling hand touched his, as 
though by enchantment the surrounding scene, the faces, the 
lights were blotted out from liim. He forgot his anger, he 
forgot everything but her and this thing she was to do. He 
had her in his grasp—he was tlie man, the master—and wliat 
enchanting readiness to yield in the swaying, pliant form ! 
In tlie distance far away gleamed the statue of llope, a child 
on ti])toe, one outstretched arm just visible from where lie 
stood. 

There Avas a moment’s silent expectation. Eveiy eye was 
rivited on the two tigui’es—on the dark, handsome man—on 
the blindfolded girl. 

At last Rose began to move gently forward. It was a 
strange wavering motion. The breath came quickly through 
her slightly parted lips ; her bright color was ebbing. She 
was conscious of nothing but the gras]) in which her hand was 
held—otherwise her mind seemed a blank. Her state during 
the next few seconds was not unlike the state of some one 
under the partial influence of an aniesthetic ; a benumbing 
grip was laid on her faculties, and she knew nothing of how 
she moved or where she was going. 

Suddenly the trance cleared away. It might have lasted half 
an hour or five seconds, for all she knew. But she was stand¬ 
ing Tieside a small marble statue in the furthest drawing-room, 
and her lips had on them a slight sense of chill, as thougli they 
had just been laid to something cold. 

Slie }mlled off the handkerchief from her e^^es. Above her 
was Langham’s face, a marvelous glow and animation in every 
line of it. 

“ Have I done it ?” she asked, in a tremulous whisper. 

For the moment her self-control was gone. She was still 
bewildered. 

He nodded, smiling. 

“ I am so glad,” she said, still in the same quick whis|)er, 
gazing at him. Tliere was the most adorable abandon in her 
whole look and attitude. He could but just restrain himself 
from taking her in his arms, and for one bright, flashing in¬ 
stant each saw nothing but the other. 

The heavy curtain which had partially hidden the door of 
the little old-fashioned powder-closet as they approached it, 
and through which they had swept without heeding, was 
drawing back with a rattle. 


486 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


“ She has doiie it ! Hurrah ! ” cried Mr. Flaxman. “ What 
a rush that last was, Miss Leyburii. You left us all behind.” 

Rose turned to him, still dazed, drawing her hand across 
her eyes. A rush ? She had known nothing about it! 

Mr. Flaxman turned and walked back, apparently to report 
to his aunt, who, with Lady Helen, had been watching the ex¬ 
periment from the main drawing-room ! His face was a curi¬ 
ous mixture of gravity and the keenest excitement. The 
gravity was mostly sharp compunction. He had satisfied a 
passionate curiosity, but in the doing of it he had outraged 
certain instincts of breeding and refinement which were now 
revenging themselves. 

“ Did she do it exactly ? ” said Lad}^ Helen eagerly. 

‘‘Exactly,” he said, standing still. 

Lady Charlotte looked at him significantly. But he would 
not see her look. 

“ Lady Charlotte, Avhere is my sister ? ” said Rose, coming up 
from the back room, looking now nearly as white as her dress. 

It appeared that Agnes had just been carried off by a lady 
who lived on Campden Hill close to the Leyburns, and who 
had been obliged to go at the beginning of the last experiment. 
Agnes, torn between her interest in what was going on and her 
desire to get back to her mother, had at last hurriedly accepted 
this Mrs. Sherwood’s offer of a seat in her carriage, imagining 
that her sister would want to stay a good deal later, and rely¬ 
ing on Lady Charlotte’s promise that she should be safely put 
into a hansom. 

“ I must go,” said Rose, putting her hand on her head. “ How 
tiring this is ! How long did it take, Mr. Flaxman ? ” 

“ Exactly three minutes,” he said, his gaze fixed upon her 
with an expression that only Lady Helen noticed. 

“ So little ! Good-night, Lady Charlotte ! ” and giving her 
hand first to her hostess, then to Mr. Flaxman’s bewildered 
sister, she moved away into the ci’owd. 

“ Hugh, of course you are going down with her ?” exclaimed 
Ladp Charlotte, under her breath. “ You must. I promised 
to see her safely off the premises.” 

He stood immovable. Lady Helen, with a reproachful look, 
made a step forward, but he caught her arm. 

“ Don’t spoil sport,” he said in a tone which, amid the hum 
of discussion caused by the experiment, was heard only by his 
aunt and sister. 

They looked at him—the one amazed, the other grimly ob¬ 
servant—and caught a slight significant motion of the head 
toward Langham’s distant figure. 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


487 


Langham came up and made his farewells. As he turned 
his back, Lady Helen’s large, astonished eyes followed him to 
the door. 

“ Oh, Hugh ! ” was all she could say as they came back to 
her brother. 

“ Never mind, Nellie,” he whispered, touched by the be¬ 
wildered sympathy of her look ; “ I will tell you all about it 
to-morrow. I have not been behaving well, and am not par¬ 
ticularly pleased with myself. But for her it is all right. 
Poor, pretty little thing ! ” 

And he walked away into the thick of the conversation. 

Downstairs the hall was already full of people Avaitiug for 
their carriages. Langham, hurrying down, saw Hose corning 
out of the cloak room muffled up in bi’own furs, a pale, childlike 
fatigue in her looks which set his heart beating faster than ever. 

“ Miss Leyburn, how are you going home ? ” 

“ Will you ask for a hansom, please.” 

“ Take my arm,” he said, and she clung to him through the 
crush till they reached the door. 

Nothing but private carriages were in sight. The street 
seemed blocked, a noisy tumult of horses and footmen and 
shouting men with lanterns. Which of them suggested, “ Shall 
we walk a few steps ? ” At any rate, here they were, out in the 
wind and the darkness, every step carrying them farther away 
from that moving path of noise and light behind. 

“ Ws shall find a cab at once in Park Lane,” he said. “Are 
you warm ? ” 

“ Perfectly.” 

A fur hood fitted round her face, to which the color was com¬ 
ing back. She held her cloak tightly round her, and her little 
feet, fairly well shod, slipped in and out on the dry frosty 
})avement. 

Suddenly they passed a huge unfinished house, the building 
of which was being pushed on by electric light. The great 
walls, ivory white in the glare, rose into the purply blue of the 
starry February sky, and as thej'' passed within the ‘power of 
the lamps, each saw with noonday distinctness every line and 
feature in the other’s face. Tliey swept on—the night, with 
its altei-nations of flame and shadow, an unreal and enchanted 
world about them. A space of darkness succeeded the space 
of daylight. l>chiiul them in the distance was the sound of 
hammers and workmen’s voices; before them the dim trees of 
the jDark. Not a human being was in sight. London seemed 
to exist to be the mere dark, friendly shelter of this wandering 
of theirs. 


488 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


A blast of wind blew her cloak out of her grasp. But before 
she could close it again an arm was flung around her. She 
could not speak or move, she stood passive, conscious only of 
the strangeness of the wintry wind, and of this warm breast 
against which her cheek was laid. 

“ Oh, stay there ! ” a voice said close to her ear. ‘‘ Rest 
there—pale, tired child—pale, tired little child ! ” 

That moment seemed to last an eternity. He held her close, 
cherishing and protecting her from the cold—not kissing her— 
till at length she looked up with bright eyes, shining through 
happy tears. 

“Are you sure at last?” she said, strangely enough, speak¬ 
ing out of the far depths of her own thought to his. 

“ Sure ! ” he said, his expression changing. “ What can I 
be sure of ? I am sure I am not worth your loving, sure 
that I am poor, insigniflcant, obscure, that if you give your¬ 
self to me you will be miserably throwing yourself away.” 

She looked at him, still smiling, a white sorceress weaving 
spells about him in the darkness. He drew her lightly gloved 
hand through his arm, holding the fragile fingers close in his, 
and they moved on. 

“ Do you know,” he repeated—a tone of intense melancholy 
replacing the tone of passion—“ how little I have to give you?” 

“ I know,” she answered, her face turning shyly away from 
him, her words coming from under the fur hood which had 
fallen forward a little. “ I know that—that—you are not rich, 
that you distrust yourself, tliat—” 

“ Oh, hush,” he said, and his voice was full of pain. “ You 
know so little; let me paint myself. I have lived alone, for 
myself, in myself, till sometimes there seems to be hardly any¬ 
thing in me to love or to be loved: nothing but a brain, a 
machine that exists only for certain selfish ends. habits 

are the. tyrants of years; and at Mure well, though I loved you 
there, they were strong enough to carry me away from you. 
Tliere is something paralyzing in me, which is always forbid¬ 
ding me-to feel, to will. Sometimes I think it is"an actual 
movement of effort. Can you bear with me ? Can you be 
poor? Can you live a life of monotony ? Oh, impossible,” he 
broke out, almost putting he hand away from him. “You 
wlio ought to be a queen of this world, for whom everything 
bright and brilliant is waiting if you will but stretch out your 
hand to it. It is a crime—an infamy—that I should be S})eak- 
ing to you like this ! ” 

Rose raised her head. A passing light shone upon her. She 
was trembling and pale again, but her eyes were unchanged. 


nOBKRT RLSMERE. 


480 


“Xo, no,” she said wistfully; ‘^not if you loye me.” 

He hung above her, an agony of feeling in tlie line rigid face, 
of ydiicli the beautiful featuics and surfaces were already 
worn and balanced by the life of thought. What ])0ssessed 
liim was not so much distrust of circumstances as doubt, hid¬ 
eous doubt, of himself, of this veiy passion beating within him. 
She saw' nothing, meanwdiile, but the self-deprecation which 
she knew'’ so w'ell in him, and against wdiich her love in its 
rash ignorance and generosity cried out. 

“ You will not say you love me ! ” she cried, with hurrying 
breath. “ But I know'—I know"—you do.” 

Then her courage sinking, ashamed, blushing, once more 
turning aw'ay from him—“ At least, if you don’t, I am very— 

V e ry—u n h appy. ” 

The soft words flew through his blood. For an instant he 
felt himself saved, like Faust—saved by the surpassing moral 
beauty of one moment’s impression. That she should need 
him, that his life should matter to hers ! They w'ere passing 
the garden wall of a great house. In the deepest shadow"S of 
it he stopped suddenly and kissed her. 

CHAPTER XXXYI. 

Langham parted with Rose at the corner of Martin Street. 
She w"ould not let him take her any further. 

“I will say nothing,” she w"hispered to him, as he put her 
into a passing hansom, wrapping her cloak w'armly round her, 

“ till I see you again. To-morrow' ? ” 

“To-morrow" morning,” he said, waving his hand to her, 
and in another instant he w'as facing the north wind alone. 

He walked on fast toward Beaumont Street, but by the time 
lie reached his destination midnight had struck. He made his 
way into his room, w'here the fire was still smoldering, and 
striking a light, sank into his large reading-chair, beside which 
the volumes used in the afternoon lay littered on the floor. 

He W'as suddenly penetrated wdth the cold of the night, 
and hung shivering over the few' embers w'hich still glow'ed. 
What had happened to him? In this room, in this chair, the 
self-forgetting excitement of that w'alk, scarcely half an liour-^ 
old, seems to him already long passed—incredible almost. 

And yet the brain w'as still full of images, the mind still full 
of a hundred new' impressions. That fair head against his 
breast, those soft, confiding w'ords, those yielding lips. Ah ! 
it is the poor, silent, insignificant student that has conquered. 
It is he, not the successful man of the w'orld, that has held 
fhat young and beautiful girl in his armSj and heard from her 


490 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


tlie sweetest and liumblest confession of love. Fate can have 
neither wit nor conscience to have ordained it so ; but fate lias 
so ordained it. Langhani takes note of his victory, takes 
disnml note also that the satisfaction of it has already half 
departed. 

So the great moment has come and gone. The one supreme 
experience which life and his own will had so far rigidly 
denied him, is his. lie has felt the torturing thrill of passion— 
he has evoked such an answer as all men might envy liim— 
and fresh from Rose’s kiss, from Rose’s beauty, the strange, 
maimed soul falls to a pitiless analysis of his passion, lier 
response. One moment he is at her feet in a voiceless trance 
of gratitude and tenderness ; the next—is nothing vvdiat it 
]iromises to he ?—and has the boon already, now that he has 
it in his grasp, lost some of its beauty, just as the sea-shell 
drawn out of tlie water, where its lovely iridescence tempted 
e3^e and hand, loses half its faiiy charm ? 

The night wore on. Outside an occasional cab or cart would 
rattle over the stones of the street, an occasional voice or step 
would penetrate the thin walls of the house, bringing a shock 
of sound into that silent upper room. Nothing caught Lang- 
ham’s ear. lie was absorbed in the dialogue which was to 
decide his life. 

Opposite to him, as it seemed, there sat a spectral reproduc¬ 
tion of himself, his true self, with whom he held a long and 
ghastly argument. 

“Rut I love her!—I love her I A little courage—a little 
effort—and I too can achieve what other men achieve. I have 
gifts, great gifts. Mere contact with her, the mere necessities 
of the situation, will drive me back to life, teach me how to 
live normally, like other men. I have not forced her love— 
it has been a free gift. AVho can blame me if I take it, if I 
cling to it, as the man freezing in a crevasse clutches the rope 
thrown to him ? ” 

To which the pale specter-self said scornfully : 

“ Courage and ejf'ort may as well be dropped out of j^our 
vocabulaiy. The}^ are words that you have no use for. Re¬ 
place them by two others— Jiahit aud character. Slave as you 
are of habit, of the character jmu have woven for yourself out 
of \'ears of deliberate living—Avhat wild unreason to imagine 
that love can unmake, can recreate ! What jmu are, ^mu are 
to all eternity. Bear your own burden, but for God’s sake be¬ 
guile no other human creature into trusting ^u^u with theirs ! ” 

“ But she loves me ! Im|)ossible that I should crush and 
tear so kind, so warm a heart ! I have won all she had to give, 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


491 


And now to throw her gift back in her face—oh, monstrous— 
oh, inhuman ! ” and the cold drops stood on his forehead. 

l>ut the other self was inexorable. “ You have acted as j^ou 
were bound to act—as any man may be expected to act in 
whom will and manhood and true human kindness are dying 
out, poisoned by des})air and the tyranny of the critical habit. 
l>ut at least do not add another crime to the lirst. What in 
God’s name have you to offer a creature of such claims, such 
ambitions ? Y^ouare poor—you must go ba^jk to Oxford—you 
must take up the work your soul loathes—grow more soured, 
more imbittered—maintain a useless, degrading struggle, till 
her j^outli is done, her beauty wasted, and till you yourself 
have lost every shred of decenc}^ and dignity, even that deco¬ 
rous outward life in which you can still wrap yourself from the 
world ! Think of the little house—the children—the money— 
difficulties—she, spiritually starved, every illusion gone—you 
incapable soon of love, incapable even of pity, conscious only 
of a dull rage with her, yourself, the world ! Bow the neck— 
submit—refuse that long agony for yourself and her, while 
there is still time. Kismet — Kismet! ” 

And spread out before Langham’s shrinking soul there lay 
a whole dismal liogarthiaii series, image leading to image, 
calamity to calamity, till in the last scene of all the maddened 
inward sight perceived two figures, two gray and withered 
figures, far apart, gazing at each other with cold and sunken 
eyes across dark rivers of sordid, irremediable regret. 

The hour passed away, and in the end the specter self, a 
cold and bloodless conqueror, slipped back into the soul which 
remorse and terror, love and pity, a last impulse of hope, a last 
stirring of manhood, had been alike powerless to save. 

The February dawn was just beginning when he dragged 
liimself to a table and wrote. 

Tlien for hours afterwards he sat sunk in his chair, the stupor 
of fatigue broken every now and then by a flash of curious in¬ 
trospection. It was a base thing which he had done—it was 
also a strange thing psychologically ; and at intervals he tried 
to understand it, to track it to its causes. 

At nine o’clock he crept out into the frosty daylight, found 
a commissiohaire who was accustomed to do errands for liirn, 
and sent him with a letter to Lerwick Gardens. 

On his way back he passed a gunsmith’s, and stood looking 
fascinated at the shining barrels. Then he moved away, 
shaking his head, his eyes gleaming as though the spectacle of 
himself had long ago passed the bounds of tragedy—become 
farcical even. 


492 


nOBERT ELSMERE. 


‘‘ I should only stand a month—arguing—with my linger on 
the trigger.” 

In the little hall his landlady met him, gave a start at the 
sight of him, and asked him if he ailed and if she could do 
anything for him. He grave her a sharp answer and went up¬ 
stairs, where she heard him dragging books and boxes about as 
though he were packing. 

A little later Rose was standing at the dining-room window 
of No. 27 , looking on to a few trees bedecked with rime which 
stood outside. The ground and roofs were white, a promise of 
sun was struggling through the fog. So far everything in 
these unfreqiient Oampden Hill roads was clean, crisp, enliven¬ 
ing, and the sparkle in Rose’s mood answered to that of Nature. 

Breakfast had just been cleared away. Agnes was upstairs 
with Mrs. Leyburn. Catherine, who was staying in the house 
for a day or two, was in a chair by the lire reading some letters 
forwarded to her from Bedford Square. 

He would appear some time in the morning, she supposed. 
With an expression half rueful, half amused, she fell to im¬ 
agining his interview with Catherine, with her mother. Poor 
Catherine ! Rose feels herself happy enough to allow herself 
a good honest, pang of remorse for much of her behavior to 
Catherine this winter: how thorny she has been, how unkind 
often, to this sad, changed sister. And now this will be a fresh 
blow! But afterward, when she has got over it—when she 
knows that it makes me happy—that nothing else would make 
me happy—then she will be reconciled, and she and I perhaps 
will make friends, all over again, from the beginning. 1 won’t- 
be angry or hard over it—poor Cathie ! ” 

And with regard to Mr. Flaxman. As she stands there 
waiting idly for what destiny may send her, she puts herself 
through a little light catechism about this other friend of hers. 
He had behaved somewhat oddly tow’-ard her of late; she begins 
now to remember that her exit from Lady Charlotte’s house 
the night before had been a very different matter from the 
royally attended leave-taking, presided over by Mr. Flaxman, 
which generally befell her there. Had he understood ? With 
a little toss of her head she said to herself that she did not care 
if it was so. “ I have never encouraged Mr. Flaxman to think 
I was going to marry him.” 

But of course Mi’. Flaxman will consider she has done 
badly for herself. So will Lady Chai’lotte and all her outer 
world. They will saj^ she is dismally throwing herself away, 
and her mother, no doubt influenced by the clamor, will take 
up very much the same line. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


493 


What matter ! The girl’s spirit seemed to rise against all 
the world. There was a sort of romantic exaltation in her 
sacrifice of herself, a jubilant looking-forward to remonstrance, 
a willful determination to overcome it. That she was about 
to do the last thing she could have been expected to do, gave 
her pleasure. Almost all artistic faculty goes with a love of 
surprise and caprice in life. Rose had lier full share of the 
artistic love for the impossible and the difficult. 

Besides—success ! To make a man liope and love, and live 
again —that shall be her success. She leawied against the 
window, her eyes filling, her heart very soft. 

Suddenly she saw a commissionaire coming up the little 
flagged passage to the door. He gave in a note, and imme¬ 
diately afterward the dining-room door was opened. 

“ A letter for you, miss,” said the maid. 

Rose took it—glanced at the handwriting. A bright flush— 
a surreptitious glance at Catherine who sat absorbed in a 
wandering letter from Mrs. JDarcy. Then the girl carried her 
prize to the window and opened it. 

Catherine read on, gathering up the Murewell names and 
details as some famished gleaner might gather up the scat¬ 
tered ears on a plundered field. At last something in the 
silence of the room, and of the other inmate in it, struck her. 

“ Rose,” she said, looking up, “ was that some one brought 
you a note ? ” 

The girl turned with a start—the letter fell to the ground. 
She made a faint, ineffectual effort to pick it up, and sank 
into a chair. 

“ Rose—darling ! ” cried Catherine, springing up, are you 
ill ? ” 

Rose looked at her with a perfectly colorless, fixed face, made 
a feeble negative sign, and then laying her arms on the break¬ 
fast-table in front of her, let her head fall upon them. 

Catherine stood over her aghast. “ My darling—what is 
it ? Come and lie down—take this water.” 

She })ut some close to her sister’s hand, but Rose pushed it 
away. “ Don’t talk to me,’’ she said, with difficult3\ 

Catherine knelt beside her in helpless pain and perplexity, 
her cheek resting against her sister’s shoulder as a mute sign 
of sympath}". What could be the matter ? Presently her gaze 
traveled from Rose to the letter on the floor. It lay with the 
address uppermost, and she at once recognized Langham’s 
handwriting. But before she could combine any rational ideas 
with this quick perception. Rose had partially mastered herself. 
She raised her head slowly and grasped her sister’s arm. 


494 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


“ I was startled,” she said, a forced smile on her white lips. 
‘‘ Last night Mr. Langham asked me to marry him—I expected 
him here this morning to consult with mamma and you. That 
letter is to inform me that—he made a mistake—and he is 
very sorry ! So am I ! It is so—so—^bewildering ! ” 

She got up restlessly and went to the fire, as though shiver¬ 
ing with cold. Catherine thouglit she hardly knew what she 
was saying. The elder sister followed her, and throwing an 
arm round her, pressed the slim, irresponsive figure close. 
Her eyes were bright with anger, her lips quivering. 

“ That he should dare ! ” she cried. Hose—my poor little 

Rose.” 

“ Don’t blame him ! ” said Rose, crouching down before the 
fire, while Catherine fell into the arm-chair again. “ It doesn’t 
seem to count, from you—you have always been so ready to 
blame him ! ” 

Her brow contracted ; she looked frowning into the fire, 
her still colorless mouth working painfnlly. 

Catherine was cut to the heart. “ Oh, Rose ! ” she said, 
holding out her hands, “ I will blame no one, dear. I seem 
hard—but I love you so. Oh. tell me—you would have told 
me everything once ! ” 

There was the most painful yearning in her tone. Rose lifted 
a listless right hand and put it into her sister’s outstretched 
palms. But she made no answer, till suddenly, with a smoth¬ 
ered cry, she fell toward Catherine. 

“ Catherine !• I can not bear it. I said I loved him—he 
kissed me—I could kill myself and him.” 

Catherine never forgot the mingled tragedy and domesticit}’’ 
of the hour that followed—the little familiar morning sounds in 
and about the house, maids running up and down stairs, trades¬ 
men calling, bells ringing—and here at her feet, a spectacle of 
moral and mental struggle which she only half understood, but 
which wrung her inmost heart. Two strains of feeling seemed 
to be present in Rose—a sense of shock, of wounded pride, of 
intolerable humiliation, and a strange intervening passion of 
j^ity, not for herself but for Langham, which seemed to have 
been stirred in her by his letter. But though the elder ques¬ 
tioned, and the younger seemed to answer, Catherine could 
hardly piece the story together, .nor would she find the answer 
to the question filling her own indignant heart ; “ Does she 
love him ? ” 

At last Rose got up from her crouching position by the fire 
and stood, a white ghost of herself, pushing back the bright, 
encroaching hair from eyes that were dry and feverish. 


1 


ROBERT R:LSMERE. 


495 


If I could only be angry—downright angry,” she said, 
more to hei'self than Catherine, “ it would do one good.” 

“ Give others leave to be angry for you ! ” cried Catherine. 

‘‘ Don’t ! ” said Rose, almost fiercely, drawing herself away. 
‘‘ You don’t know. It is a fate. Why did we ever meet ? You 
may read this letter ; you must—you misjudge him—you al¬ 
ways have. No, no ”—and she nervously crushed the letter in 
her hand—“ not yet. But you shall read it some time—you 
and Robert too. Married people always tell »one another. It 
is due to him, perhaps due to me too,” and a hot flush trans¬ 
figured her paleness for an instant. “ Oh, my head ! Why 
does one’s mind affect one’s body like this ? It shall not—it is 
humiliating ! ‘ Miss Leyburn has been jilted and can not see 

visitors ’—that is the kind of thing. Catherine, when you have 
finished that document, will you kindly come and hear me 
practice my last Raff—I am going. Good-by.” 

She moved to the door, but Catherine had only just time to 
catch her, or she would have fallen over a chair from sudden 
giddiness. 

Miserable ! ” she said, dashing a tear from her eyes ; “ I 
must go and lie down then in the proper missish fashion. 
Mind, on your peril, Catherine, not a word to any one but 
Robert. I shall tell Agnes. And Robert is not to speak to 
me ! No, don’t come—I will go alone.” 

And warning her sister back, she groped her way upstairs. 
Inside her room, when she had locked the door, she stood a mo¬ 
ment upright with the letter in her hand—the blotted, incoher¬ 
ent scrawl, where Langham had for once forgotten to be liter¬ 
ary, where every pitiable half-finished sentence pleaded with 
her—even in the first smart of her wrong—for pardon, for 
compassion, as toward something maimed and paralyzed from 
birth, unworthy even of her contempt. Then the tears began 
to rain over her cheeks. 

“ I was not good enough—I was not good enough—God 
would not let me ! ” 

And she fell -on her knees beside the bed, the little bit of 
paper crushed in her hands against her lips. Not good enough 
for what ? To save 9 

Hoav lightly she had dreamed of healing, redeeming, chang¬ 
ing ! And the task is refused her. It is not so much the cry 
of personal desire that shakes her as she kneels and weeps, nor 
is it mere wounded woman’s pride. It is a strange, stern sense 
of law. Had she been other than she is—more loving, less 
self-absorbed, loftier in motive—he could not have loved her 
so, have left her so. Deep undeveloped forces of character 


496 


I 


ROBERT :^LSMERE. 


stir within her. She feels herself judged—and with a right¬ 
eous judgment—issuing inexorably from the facts of life and 
circumstance. 

IVIeanwhile Catherine was shut up down stairs with Robert, 
wlio had come over early to see how the household fared. 

Robert listened to the whole luckless story with astonish¬ 
ment and dismay. This particular possibility of mischief had 
gone out of his mind for some time. lie had been busy in his 
East End work. Catherine had been silent. Over how many 
matters they would once have discussed with open heart was 
she silent now ? 

“ I ought to have been warned,” he said, with quick decis¬ 
ion, “ if you knew this was going on. I am the only man 
among you, and I understand Langham better than the rest of 
you. I might have looked after the poor child a little.” 

Catherine accepted the reproach mutely as one little smart 
the more. However, what had she known ? She had seen 
nothing unusual of late, nothing to make her think a crisis was 
approa,ching. Nay, she had flattered herself that Mr. Flax- 
man, whom she liked, was gaining ground. 

Meanwhile Robert stood pondering anxiously what could 
be done. Could anything be done ? 

‘‘ I must go and see him,” he said presently. ‘‘ Yes, dearest, 
I must. Impossible the thing should be left so ! I am his old 
friend—almost her guardian. You say she is in great trouble 
—why, it may shadow her whole life ! No !—he must explain 
things to us—he is bound to—he shall. It may be something 
comparatively trivial in the way after all—money or prospects 
or something of the sort. You have not seen the letter, you say? 
It is the last marriage in the world one could have desired for 
her—but if she loves him, Catherine, if she loves him—” 

He turned to her—appealing, remonstrating. Catherine 
stood pale and rigid. Incredible that he should think it right 
to intermeddle—to take the smallest step toward reversing so 
])lain a declaration of God’s will! She could not sympathize— 
she would not consent. Robert watched her in painful inde¬ 
cision. He knew that she thought him indifferent to her true 
reason for flnding some comfort even in her sister’s trouble— 
that he seemed to her mindful only of the passing human 
misery, indifferent to the eternal risk. 

They stood sadly looking at one another. Then he snatched 
up his hat. 

I must go,” he said, in a low voice ; it is right.” 

And he went—stepping, however, with the best intentions 
m the world, into a blunder. 


497 


nOBERT ELSMERE. 

Catherine sat painfully struggling with herself after he had 
left her. Then some one came into the room—some one with 
pale looks and flashing eyes. It was Agnes. 

“She just let me in to tell me, and put me out again,” said 
the girl—her whole, even, cheerful self one flame of scorn and 
wrath. “ What are such creatures made for, Catherine—why 
do they exist ? ” 

Meanwhile Robert had trudged off through the frosty morn¬ 
ing streets to Langham’s lodgings. His mood \yas very hot by 
the time he reached his destination, and he climbed tlie stair¬ 
case to Langhain’s room in some excitement. When he tried 
to open the door after the answer to his knock bidding him 
enter, he found something barring the way. “ AVait a little,” 
said the voice inside, “I will move the case.” 

With difficulty the obstacle was removed and the door 
opened. Seeing his visitor, Langham stood for a moment in 
somber astonishment. The room was littered with books and 
packing-cases with which he had been busy. 

“ Come in,” he said, not offering to shake hands. 

Robert shut the door, and, picking his way among the books, 
• stood leaning on the back of the chair Langham pointed out 
to him. Langham paused opposite to him, his waving jet- 
black hair falling forward over the marble pale face which 
had been Robert’s young ideal of manly beauty. 

The two men were only six years distant in age, but so strong 
is old association that Robert’s feeling toward liis friend had 
alwaj’-s remained in many respects the feeling of the under¬ 
graduate toward the don. His sense of it now filled him with 
a curious awkwardness. 

“ I know why you are come,” said Langham, slowly, after 
a scrutiny of his visitor. 

“ I am here by a mere accident, ’ said the other, thinking 
perfect frankness best. “ My wife was present when her sister 
received your letter. Rose gave her leave to tell me. I had 
gone us to ask after them all, and come on to you—of course 
on my own responsibility entirely ! Rose knows nothing of 
my coming—nothing of what I have to say.” 

He paused, struck against his will by the looks of the man 
before him. AVhatever he had done during the past twenty- 
four hours, he had clearly had the grace to suffer in the doing 
of it. 

“You can have nothing to say ! ” said Langham, leaning 
against the chimney-piece and facing him with black, darkly 
burning eyes. You know me.” 

Never had Robert seen him under this aspect, All the de- 


498 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


spaii-, all the bitterness hidden under the languid student’s 
exterior of every day, had, as it were, risen to the surface, 
lie stood at bay, against his friend, against himself. 

“No!” exclaimed Robert stoutly. “Ido not know you 
in the sense you mean. I do not know you as the man who 
could beguile a girl on to a confession of love, and then 
tell her that for you marriage was too great a burden to be 
faced!” 

Langham started, and then closed his lips in an iron silence. 
Robei-t repented him a little. Langham’s strange individual¬ 
ity always impressed him against his will. 

“ I did not come simply to reproach you, Langham,” he went 
on, “though I confess to being very hot! I came to try and 
hnd out—for myself only, mind—whether what prevents you 
from following up what I understand happened last night is 
really a matter of feeling, or a matter of outward circumstance. 
If, upon reflection, you find that your feeling for Rose is not 
what you imagined it to be, 1 shall have my own opinion about 
your conduct—but I shall be the first to acquiesce in what you 
have done this morning. If, on the other hand, you are sim¬ 
ply afraid of yourself in harness, and afraid of the I’esponsibili- 
ties of practical married life, I can not help begging you to 
talk the matter over with me, and let us face it together. 
Whether Rose would ever, under any circumstances, get over 
the shock of tliis morning I have not the remotest idea. But ” 
—and he hesitated—“ it seems the feeling you appealed to 
yesterday has been of long growth. You know perfectly well 
what havoc a thing of this kind may make in a girl’s life. I 
don’t say it will. But, at aii}^ rate, it is all so desperately 
serious I could not hold my hand. I am doing what is no 
doubt wholly unconventional ; but I am your friend and her 
brother ; I brought you together, and I ask you to take me 
into counsel. If you had but done it before ! ” 

There was a moment’s dead silence. 

“You can not pretend to believe,” said Langham at last, 
with the same somber self-containedness, “ that a marriage 
with me would be for your sister-in-law’s happiness ? ” 

“ I don’t know what to believe ! ” cried Robert. “ No,” he 
added, frankly, “ no ; when I saw you first attracted by Rose 
at Murewell I disliked the idea heartily ; I was glad to see you 
separated ; a iwiori^ I never thought jmu suited to each other. 
But reasoning that holds good when a thing is wholly in the 
air looks very different Avhen a man has committed himself 
and another, as you have done.” 

Langham surveyed him for a moment, then shook his hair 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


499 


impatiently from liis eyes and rose from liis bending position 
by the tire. 

“ Elsmere, there is nothing to be said! I have beliaved as vile¬ 
ly as you please. I have forfeited your friendship. But I should 
be an even greater tiend and weakling than you think me if, in 
eold blood, I could let your sister run the I'isk of marrying me. 

I eould not trust myself—you may think of the statement as 
you like—I should make her ?/nserable. Last night I had not 
})ai-ted from her an hour before I was utterly and irrevocably 
sure of it. My habits are my mastei’s. I believe,” he added, 
slowly, his e^’-es fixed weirdly on something be}'ond Robert, “ I 
could even grow to hate what came between me and them ! ” 

Was it the last word of the man’s life? It struck Robert 
Avith a kind of shiver. 

“ Pray Heaven,” he said, with a groan, getting up to go, 
“you may not haAX made her miserable already ! ” 

“ Did it hurt her so much ? ” asked Langham, almost in- 
audibly, turning away, Robert’s tone meanwhile calling up a 
new and scorching image in the subtle brain tissue. 

“I have not seen her,” said Robert abruptly ; “but Avhen I 
-came in I found my wife —who has no light tears— Aveeping 
for her sister.” 

His voice dropped as though AA'hat he Avere saying Avere in ^ 
truth too pitiful and too intimate for speech. 

Langham said no more. His face had become a marble 
mask again. 

“ Good-by ! ” said Robert, taking up his hat Avith a dismal 
sense of having got foolishly through a fool’s errand. “ As I 
said to you before, Avhat Rose’s feeling is at this moment I can 
not even guess. Very likely she would be the first to repudiate 
lialf of Avhat I have been saying. And I see that you Avill not 
talk to me—you will not take me into your confidence and 
speak to me not only as her brother, but as your friend. And 
—and—are you going ? What does this mean ? ” 

He looked interrogatively at the open packing-cases. 

“ I am going back to Oxford,” said the other briefiy. “ I 
can not stay in these rooms, in these streets.” 

Robert Avas sore perplexed. AVhat real—nay, Avhat terrible 
suffering—in the face and manner, and yet how futile, how 
needless ! He felt himself Avrestling Avith something intangi¬ 
ble and phantom-like, wholly unsubstantial, and yet endowed 
• Avith a ghastly, indefinite power over human life. 

“ It is A^ery hard,” he said hurriedly, moving nearer, “ that 
our old friendship should be crossed like this. Do trust me a 
little ! You are always undervaluing yourself. AVhy not take 


500 


ROBERT ELSMERPl 


a friend into council sometimes when you sit in judgment on 
yourself and your possibilities ? Your own perceptions are all 
warped ! ” 

Langham, looking at him, thought his smile one of the most 
beautiful and one of the most irrelevant things he had ever 
seen. 

“ I will write to you, Elsmere,” he said, holding out his hand; 
“ speech is impossible to me. I never had any words except 
through my pen.” 

Robert gave it up. In another minute Langham was left 
alone. 

ILit he did no more packing for hours. lie spent the middle 
of the day sitting dumb and immovable in his chair. Imagina¬ 
tion was at work again more feverishly than ever. He was 
tortured by a fixed image of Rose, suffering and paling. 

And after a certain number of hours he could no more bear 
the incubus of this thought than he could put up with the flat 
prospects of married life the night before. He was all at sea, 
barely sane, in fact. His life had been so long purely intel¬ 
lectual that this sudden strain of passion and fierce practical 
interests seem to unhinge him, to destroy his mental balance. 

He bethought him. This afternoon he knew she had a last 
rehearsal at Searle House. Afterward her custom was to come 
back from St. James’s Park to High Street, Kensington, and 
walk up the hill to her own home. He knew it, for on two 
occasions after these rehearsals he had been at Lerwick Gar¬ 
dens, waiting for her, with Agnes and INIrs. Leyburn. Would 
she go this afternoon ? A subtle instinct told him that she 
would.' 

It was nearly six o’clock that evening when Rose, stepping 
out from the High Street station, crossed the main road and 
])assed into the darkness of otie of the streets leading u]) the 
hill. She had forced herself to go, and she would go alone. 
Jbit as she toiled along she felt weary and bruised all over. 
She carried with her a heart of lead—a sense of utter soreness 
—a longing to hide herself from eyes and tongues. The only 
thing that'dwelt softly in the shaken mind was a sort of in¬ 
consequent memory of Mr. Flaxman’s manner at the rehearsal. 
Had she looked so ill? She flushed hotly at the thought, and 
then realized again, with a sense of childish comfort, the kind 
look and voice, the delicate care shown in shielding her from 
an}^ unnecessary exertion, the brotherl}" grasp of the hand with 
Avhich he had put her into the cab that took her to the Under¬ 
ground, 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


501 


Suddenly, where the road made a dark turn to the right, she 
saw a man standing. As she came nearer she saw that it was 
Langham. 

“ You ! ” she cried, stopping. 

He came up to her. There was a light over the doorway 
of a large detached house not far off, which threw a certain 
illumination over him, though it left her in shadow. He said 
nothing, but he held out both his hands muXely. She fancied 
rather than saw the pale emotion of his look. 

“ What ? ” she said, after a pause. “ You think to-night is 
last night ! You and I have nothing to say to each other, 
Mr. Langham.” 

“ I have everything to say,” he answered, under his breath : 
‘‘ I have committed a crime—a villainy.” 

‘‘ And it is not pleasant to you ? ” said she, quivering. ‘‘ I 
am sorry—I can not help you. But you are wrong—it was no 
crime—it was necessary and profitable, like the doses of one’s 
childhood ! Oh ! I might have guessed you w’^ould do this ! 
No, Mr. Langham, I am in no danger of an interesting decline. 
I have just played my concerto very fairly. I shall not dis¬ 
grace myself at the concert to-morrow night. You may be at 
peace—I have learned several things to-day that have been 
salutary—very salutary.” 

She paused. He walked beside her while she pelted him— 
unresisting, helplessly silent, 

“ Don’t come any further,” she said resolutely, after a min¬ 
ute, turning to face him. “ Let us be quits ! I was a tempt- 
ingly easy prey. I bear no malice. And do not let me break 
your friendship with Robert ; that began before this foolish 
business—it should outlast it. Very likely we shall be friends 
again, like ordinary people, some da}^ I do not imagine your 
wound is very deep, and—” 

But no ! Her lips closed ; not even for pride’s sake, and re¬ 
tort’s sake,will she desecrate the j^ast, belittle her own first love. 

She held out her hand. It was very dark. He could see 
nothing among her furs but the gleaming whiteness of her 
face. The whole personality seemed centered in the voice— 
the half-mocking, vibrating voice. He took her hand and 
drop]>cd it instantly. 

“You do not understand,” he said hopelessly—feeling as 
though every phrase he uttered, or could utter, were equally 
fatuous, equally shameful. “ Thank Heaven, you never will 
understand.” 

“ I think I do,” she said, with a change of tone, and ])aused. 
He raised his eyes involuntarily, met hers, and stood bewil- 


502 


BOBERT ELSMERE. 


dered. What icas the expression in them ? It was yearning— 
blit not the yearning of passion. “ If things had been different 
—if one could cliange the self—if the past were nobler ! ”— 
was that the cry of them ? A painful humility—a boundless 
pity—the rise of some moral wave within her he could neither 
measure nor explain—these were some of the impressions which 
passed from her to him. A fresh gulf opened between them, 
and he saw her transformed on the further side, with, as it 
were, a loftier gesture, a nobler stature, than had ever yet 
been hers. 

lie bent forward quickly, caught her hands, held them for 
an instant to his lips in a convulsive grasp, dropped them, and 
was gone. 

He gained his own room again. There lay the medley of 
his books, his only friends, his real passion. Why had he 
ever tampered witli any other ? 

It teas not love — 7iot love!’’’^ he said to himself with an 
accent of infinite relief, as he sank into his chair. ^^Iler 
smart will heal.” 


BOOK VL—KEW OPEKIKGS. 

CHAPTER XXXVII. 

Ten <1ays after Langham’s return to Oxford Elsmere received 
a characteristic letter from him, asking whether their friend¬ 
ship was to be considered as still existing or at an end. The 
calm and even proud melancholy of the letter sliowed a con¬ 
siderable subsidence of that state of half-frenzied irritation and 
discomfort in which Elsmere had last seen him. Tlie writer, 
indeed, was clearly settling down into another period of pessi¬ 
mistic quietism such as that which had followed upon his first 
young elforts at self-assertion jmars before. But this second 
})eriod bore the marks of an even profounder depression of all 
the vital foi’ces than the first, and as Elsmere, with a deep 
sigh, half angry, half relenting, put down the letter, he felt the 
conviction that no fresh influence from outside would ever 
again be allowed to penetrate the solitude of Langham’s life. 
In conq)arison with the man who had just addressed him, the 
tutor of his undergraduate recollections was a vigorous and 
sociable human being. 

The relenting grew upon him, and he wrote a sensible, alfec- 
tionate letter in return. Whatever liad been his natural feel¬ 
ings of reseiitment, he said, he could not realize, now that the 



UOBEUT ELSMERE. 


503 


crisis was past, that lie cared less about his old friend. “ As 
far as we two are concerned, let us forget it all. I could hardly 
say this, you will easily imagine, if I thought that you had 
done serious or irreparable harm. But both my wife and I 
agree now in thinking that by a pure accident, as it were, and 
to her own surprise. Rose has escaj)ed either. It will be some 
time, no doubt, before she will admit it. A girl is not so easily 
disloyal to her past. Ihit to us it is tolera*bly clear. At any 
rate, I send you our opinion for what it is worth, believing 
that it will and must be welcome to ^mu.” 

Rose, however, was not so long in admitting it. One 
marked result of that new vulnerableness of soul produced in 
her by the shock of that February morning was a great soften¬ 
ing toward Catherine. Whatever might have been C-atheriue’s 
intense relief when Robert returned from his abortive mission, 
she never afterward let a disparaging word toward Langluun 
escape her lips to Rose. She was tenderness and sympathy 
itself, and Rose, in her curious reaction against her old self, 
and against the noisy world of flattery and excitement in 
which she had been living, turned to Catherine as she had 
never done since she was a tiny child. She would spend hours 
in a corner of the Bedford Sijuare drawing-room, jiretending 
to read, or ])lay with little jMary, in reality recovering, like 
some bruised and trodden plant, under the healing influence of 
thought and silence. 

One day, when they were alone in the fire-light, she startled 
Catherine by saying, with one of her old odd smiles ; 

“ Do, you know, Cathie, how I always see myself nowadays? 
It is a sort of hallucination. I see a girl at the foot of a 
]>recipice. She has had a fall, and she is sitting up, feeling 
all her lind)s. And, to her great astonishment, there is no 
bone broken ! ” 

And she held herself back from Catherine’s knee lest her 
sister should attempt to caress her, her eyes bright and calm. 
Nor would she allow an answer, drowning all that Catherine 
might have said in a sudden rush after the child, who was 
wandering round them in search of a playfellow. 

In truth. Rose Leyburn’s girlish passion for Edward Lang- 
ham had been a kind of accident unrelated to the main forces 
of character. lie had crossed her path in a moment of discon¬ 
tent, of aimless revolt and longing, when she was but fresh 
emerged from the cramping conditions of her childhood and 
trembling on the brink of new and unknown activities. His 
intellectual prestige, his melancholy, his personal beauty, his 
very strangenesses and weaknesses, had made a deep impression 


504 


nOBERT ELSMEUE. 


on tlie girl’s immature romantic sense. IFis I'esistance liad in¬ 
creased llie cliai'rn, and the interval of angry, resentfid sej»ara- 
tion had done nothing to weaken it. As to the months in ]..on- 
don, they had been one long duel between herself and him—a 
duel which had all the fascination of ditflcuUy^ and uncei-taint}", 
but in which ])ride and capiace had dealt and sustained a large 
|)i-oj)ortion of the blows. Then, after a moment of intoxicat¬ 
ing victory, Langham’s endangered habits and threatened 
individuality had asserted themselves once for all. And from 
the whole long struggle—jjassion, exultation, and crushing 
<lefeat—it often seemed to lier that she had gained neither 
joy nor irreparable gidef, but a new birth of character, a soul ! 

It may be easily imagined that Hugh Flaxman felt a ])ecu- 
liarly keen interest in Langham’s disapjiearance. On the 
afternoon of the Searle House rehearsal he had awaited 
Hose’s coming in a state of extraordinary irritation. He ex- 
)>ected a blushing Jiancee, in a fool’s paradise, asking by 
manner, if not by woixl, for his congratulations, and taking a 
decent feminine pleasure perhaps in the ]>ang she might 
suspect in him. And he had already taken Jiis pleasure in the 
planning of some double-edged congratulations. 

Then up the steps of the concert platform there came a 
pale, tired girl, who seemed specially to avoid Ids look, who 
found a quiet corner, and said hardly a word to anjdmdy till 
lier turn came to play. 

His revulsion of feeling was complete. After her piece he 
made his wa}^ up to her, and was her watchful, unobtrusive 
guardian for the rest of the afternoon. 

He walked home after he had put her into her cab, in a 
whirl of impatient conjecture. 

“ As compared to last night, she looks this afternoon as if 
she had liad an illness ! What on earth has that philandering 
ass been about? If he did not propose to her last night, he 
ought to be shot—and if he did, a fortiori, for clearly she is 
mim'ahU. Hut what a brave child ! How she played her 
])art! I wonder whether she thiidvs that I saw nothing, like 
all the rest ! Poor little cold hand ! ” 

Next day in the street he met Elsmere, turned and walked 
with him, and by dint of leading the conversation a little dis¬ 
covered that Langham had left London. 

Gone ! but not without a crisis—that was evident. During 
the din of preparations for the Searle House concert, and dur¬ 
ing the meetings which it entailed, now at the Varleys’, now 
at the house of some other connection of his—for the concert 
was the work of his friends, and given in the town house of 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


505 


his decrepit great-uncle, Lord Daniel—he had many opportu¬ 
nities of observing Rose. And he felt a soft, indefinable 
change in her which kept him in a perpetual answering vibra¬ 
tion of sympathy and curiosity. She seemed to him for the 
moment to have lost her passionate relish for living, that 
relish Avhich had always been so marked with her. Her bub¬ 
ble of social pleasure Avas ])ricked. She d4d everything she 
had to do, and did it admirably. But all through she Avas to 
his fane}” absent and distraite, ]>ursuing through the tumult of 
Avliich she Avas often the central figure some inner meditations 
of Avhich neither he nor any one else kneAV anything. Some 
eclipse had passed over the girl’s light, self-satisfied temper ; 
some searching thrill of experience had gone through the 
Avliole nature. She had suffered, and she was quietly fighting 
down her suffering Avithout a Avord to anybody. 

Flaxman’s guesses as to Avhat had happened came often very 
near the truth, and the mixture of indignation and relief Avith 
which he received his own conjectures amused himself. 

“ To think,” he said to himself once, with a long breath, 
“ that that creature Avas never at a public scliool, and Avill go 
to his death without any kickings due to him ! ” 

Then his veiy next impulse, perhaps, would be an impulse 
of gratitude toward this same ‘^creature,” toward the man 
Avho had released a prize he had had the tardy sense to see 
Avas not meant for him. Free again—to be loved, to be Avon ! 
There Avas the fact of facts, after all. 

His OAvn future policy, however, gave him much anxious 
thought. Clearly at present the one thing to be done was to 
keep his own ambitions carefully out of sight. He had the 
skill to see that she Avas in a state of reaction, of moral and 
mental fatigue. What she seemed to mutely ask of her friends 
Avas not to be made to feel. 

He took his cue accordingly. He talked to his sister. He 
kept Lady Charlotte in order. After all her eager expectation 
on Hugh’s behalf. Lady Helen had been dumbfounded by the 
smlden emergence of Langham at Lady Charlotte’s ])arty for 
their common discomfiture. Who was the man ?—Avhy, Avhat 
did it all mean ? Hugh had the most provoking way of giving 
you half his confidence. To tell you he was seriously in love, 
and to omit to add the trifling item that the girl in (piestion was 
))rol^abl 3 ^ on the point of engaging herself to somebody else ! 
Ladv Helen made believe to be angry, and it was not till she 
had Veduced Hugh to a Avhirnsical penitence and a full confes¬ 
sion of all he knew or suspected, that she consented, with as 
much loftiness as the pliysicjue of an elf allowed ])er, to be his 


506 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


good friend again, and toplay tliose cards for liiin wliich at the 
moment he could not play for himself. 

8o in the cheeriest, daintiest way Rose was made much of by 
both brother and sister. Lady Helen chatted of gowns and 
music and peo])le, whisked Rose and Agnes off to this party 
and that, brought fruit and flowers to Mrs. Leyburn, made 
pretty, deferential love to Catherine, and generally, to Mrs. 
Iberson’s disgust, l)ecame the girls’ chief cha})erpn in a fast¬ 
filling London. Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman was always there to 
befriend or amuse his sisters protegees—always thei’e, but 
never in the way. He was bantering, sympathetic, critical, 
laudatoiy, what you will ; but all the time he preserved a deli¬ 
cate distance between himself and Rose, a bright nonchalance 
and impersonality of tone toward her which made his com])an- 
ionship a perpetual tonic. And, between them, he and Helen 
coerced Lady Charlotte. A few inconvenient inquiries after 
Rose’s health, a few unexplained stares and “ humphs ” and 
grunts, a few irrelevant disquisitions on her nephew’s merits 
of head and heart, .were all she was able to allow herself. And 
yet she was inwardly seething with a mass of sentiments, to 
which it would have been pleasant to give expression—anger 
with Rose for having been so blind and so presumptuous as to 
})refer some one else to Hugh ; anger with Hugh for his per¬ 
sistent disregard of her advice and the duke’s feelings ; and a 
burning desire to know the why and wherefore of Langham’s 
disappearance. She was too lofty to become Rose’s aunt with¬ 
out a struggle, but she was not too lofty to feel the hungriest 
interest in her love affairs. 

But, as we have said, the person who for the time profited 
most by Rose’s shaken mood was Catherine. The girl coming 
over, restless under her own smart, would fall to watching the 
trial of the woman and the Avife, and would often perforce for¬ 
get herself and her smaller woes in the pity of it. She stayed 
in Bedford Square once for a week, and then for the first time 
she realized the profound change Avhich had passed over the 
Elsmeres’ life. As much tenderness between husband and 
wife as ever—perhaps more ex})ression of it even than before, 
as though from an instinctive craving to hid the separateness 
below from each other and from the Avorld. But Robert Avent 
his Avay, Catherine hers. Theii*spheres of Avork lay far apart; 
their interests AA^ere diverging fast ; and thougli Robert at any 
rate Avas perpetually resisting, all sorts of fresh invading 
silences Avere ahvays coming in to limit talk, and increase the 
number of sore points Avhich each avoided. Robert was hard 
at AVork in the East End under Murray Edwardes’s auspices, 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


507 


He was already known to certain circles as a seceder from the 
Church who was likely to become both powerful and popular. 
Tvyo articles of his in the Nineteenth Century on disputed 
points of Biblical criticism, had distinctly made their mark, 
and several of the veterans of philosoi)hical debate had already 
taken friendly and flattering notice of the new Avriter. Mean¬ 
while Catherine was teaching in Mr. Clarendon’s Sunday- 
school, and attending his prayer-meetings. The more expan¬ 
sive Robert’s energies became, the more she suftered, and the 
more the small daily opportunites for friction multiplied. 
Soon she could hardly bear to hear him talk about his work, 
and she never opened the number of the Nmeteenth Cen¬ 
tury Avhich contained his papers. Nor had he the heart to 
ask her to read them. 

Murray Edwardes had received Elsmere, on his first appear¬ 
ance in R-, with a cordiality and helpfulness of the most 

self-elfacing kind. Robert had begun with assuring his new 
friend that he saw no chance, at any rate for the present, of 
his formally joining the Unitarians. 

“ I have not the heart to pledge myself again just yet ! And 
I own I look rather for a combination from many sides than 
for the development of any now existing sect. But suppos¬ 
ing,” he added, smiling, “sup])Osing I do in time set up a con¬ 
gregation and a service of my own, is there really room for 
you and me ? Should I not be infringing on a Avork I respect 
a great deal too much for anything of the sort?” 

EdAvardes laughed the notion to scorn. 

The parish, as aAvhole, contained 20,000 persons. The exit¬ 
ing churches, Avdiich, Avith the exception of St. Wilfrid’s, Avere 
miserably attended, provided accommodation at the outside 
for 3000. His own chapel held 400, and was about half full. 

‘‘ You and I may drop our lives here,” he said, his pleasant 
friendless darkened for a moment by the look of melancholy 
Avhich London Avork seems to develop eAxui in the most 
buoyant of men, “and only a few hundred persons, at the 
most, be ever the Aviser. Begin with us—then make your 
own circle.” 

And he fortlnAuth carried off his visitor to the point from 
Avhich, as it seemed to him, Elsmere’s Avork might start, viz., 
a lecture-room half a mile from his own chapel, Avhere two 
helpers of his had just established an independent venture. 

Murray EdAvardes had at the time an interesting and mis¬ 
cellaneous staff of lay-curates. He asked no questions as to 
religious opinions, but in general the men who volunteered un¬ 
der him—civil servants, a young doctor, a briefless barrister or 


508 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


two—were men who drifted from received beliefs, and found a 
pleasure and freedom in working for and with him they could 
hardly have found elsewhere. The two who had planted their 
outpost in wliat seemed to tliem a particularly promising cor¬ 
ner of the district were men of whom Edwardes knew person¬ 
ally little. “ I have really not much concern with what they 
do,” he explained to Elsmere, “ except that they get a small 
share of our funds. But I known they want help, and if they 
will take you in, I think you will make something of it.” 

After a tramp though the muddy winter streets, they came 
u])on a new block of warehouses, in the lower windows of 
which some bills announced a night-school, for boys and men. 
Here, to judge from the commotion round the doors, a lively 
scene was going on. Outside, a gang of young roughs were 
hammering at the doors, and shrieking witticisms through the 
keyhole. Inside, as soon as Murray Edwardes and Elsmere, 
by dint of good-humor and strong shoulders, had succeeded in 
shoving their way through and shutting the door behind them, 
tlie}^ found a still more animated performance in progress. 
The school-room was in almost total darkness ; the pupils, 
some twenty in number, were racing about, like so many shad¬ 
owy demons, pelting each other and their teachers with the 
“ dips ” which, as the buildings were new, and not yet fitted 
for gas, had been provided to light them through their three 
H’s. In the middle stood the two philanthropists they were 
in search of, freely bedaubed with tallow, one employed in box¬ 
ing a boy’s ears, the other in saving a huge ink-bottle, whereon 
some enterprising spirit had just laid hands by way of varying 
the rebel ammunition. Murray Edwardes, who was in his 
element, went to the rescue at once, helped l)y Robert. The 
boy minister, as he looked, had been in fact bow ” of the 
Cambridge eight, and possessed muscles which men twice his 
size might have envied. In three minutes he had put a couple 
of ringleaders into the street b}^ the scruff of the neck, re¬ 
lighted a lamp which had been turned out, and got the rest of 
the rioters in hand. Elsinere backed him ably, and in a very 
short time they had cleared the premises. 

Then the four looked at each other, and Edwardes went off 
into a shout of laughter. 

“ My dear Wardlaw, my condolence to your coat ! But I 
don’t believe if I were a rough myself I could resist ‘dips.’ 
Let me introduce a friend—Mr. Elsmere—and if you will have 
liim, a recruit for your work. It seems to me another pair of 
arms will liardly come amiss to you ! ” 

Th<‘ short, red-haired man addressed shook hands with Els* 


nOBERf ELSMERE. 


509 


mere, scrutinizing liim from under bushy ej^'chrows. He was 
panting and beplastered witli tallow, but the inner man was 
evidently cpiite nnrnttled, and I^lsniere liked the shrewd Scotch 
face and gray eyes. 

“ It isn’t only a pair of arms we want,” he remarked dryly, 
“ but a bit of science behind them. Mr. Elsrnere, I observed, 
can use his.” 

Then he turned to a tall, affected-looking youth with a large 
nose and long fair hair, who stood gasping with his hands 
upon his sides, his eyes, full of a moody wrath, fixed on the 
wreck and disarray of the school room. 

“ Well, Mackay, have they knocked the wind out of you ? 
IMy friend and helper—Mr. Elsmere. Come and sit down, 
won’t you a minute ? They’ve left us the chairs, I perceive, 
and there’s a spark or two of fire. Do you smoke ? Will you 
light up ? ” 

The four men sat on chatting some time, and then Wardlaw 
and Elsmere walked home together. It had been all arranged. 
Mackay, a curious, morbid fellow, who had thrown himself into 
IJnitarionism and charity, mainly out of opposition to an ortho¬ 
dox and bourgeois family, and who had a great idea of his own 
social powers, was somewhat grudging and ungracious through 
it all. • But Elsmere’s proposals were much too good to be re¬ 
fused. He offered to bring to the undertaking his time, his 
clergyman’s experience, and as much money as might be 
wanted. Wardlaw listened to him cautiously for an hour, 
took stock of the whole man pliysically and morally, and finally 
said, as he very quietly and deliberately knocked the ashes out 
of his pipe : 

“All right, I’m your man, Mr. Elsmere. If Mackay agrees, 
I vote we make you captain of this venture.” 

“Nothing of the sort,” said Elsmere. “In London I am a 
novice ; I come to learn, not to lead.” 

Wardlaw shook his head with a little shrewd smile. Mac¬ 
kay faintly indorsed his companion’s offer, and the party 
broke up. 

That was in January. In two months from that time, by the 
natural force of things, Elsmere, in spite of diffidence and his 
own most sincere wish to avoid a premature leadershij), had 
become the head and heart of the Elgood Street undertaking, 
which had already assumed much larger proportions. AVard- 
law was giving his silent approval and invaluable help, while 
young Mackay was in the first uncomfortable stages of a 
hero-worship which promised to be exceedingly good for him. 


510 


ROBERT BLSMERE. 


CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

There were one or two curious points connected with the 

beginnings of Elsmere’s venture in North R-, one of which 

may just be noticed here. Wardlaw, his predecessor and col¬ 
league, liad speculatively little or nothing in common with Els- 
mere or Murray Edwardes. lie was a devoted and orthodox 
Comtist, for whom Edwardes had pi’ovided an outlet for the 
philanthropic passion, as he had for many others belonging to 
far stranger and remoter faiths. 

By profession he was a barrister, with a small and struggling 
practice. On this practice, however, he had married, and his 
wife, who had been a doctor’s daughter and a national scliool- 
niistress, had the same ardors as himself. They lived in one of 
the dismal little squares near the Goswell Road, and had two 
children. The wife, as a Positivist mother is bound to do, 
tended and taught her children entirely herself. She might 
have been seen any day wheeling their perambulator through 
the dreary streets of a dreaiy region : she was their providence, 
their deity, the re])resentative to them of all tenderness and all 
authority. But when her work with them was done, she would 
throw herself into charity organization cases, into efforts for the 
})rotection of work-house servants, into the homeliest act of min¬ 
istry toward the sick, till her dowdy little figure and her face, 
which but for the stress of London, of labor, and of poverty, 
would have had a blunt, fresh-colored dairy-maid’s charm, be¬ 
came S3unbols of a divine and sacred helpfulness in the eyes of 
hundreds of straining men and women. 

The husband also, after a da}^ spent in chambers, would give 
his evenings to teaching or committee work. They never al¬ 
lowed themselves to breathe ev^en to each other that life might 
have brighter things to show them than the neighborhood of 
the Goswell Road. There was a certain narrowness in their de¬ 
votion ; they had their bitterness and ignorance like other peo¬ 
ple ; but the more Robert knew of them the more profound be¬ 
came his admiration for that potent S])irit of social help which 
in our generation Comtism has done so much to develop, even 
among those of us who are but moderatelj^ influenced by Comte’s 
philoso])liy, and can make nothing of the religion of llumanity. 

AVardlaw has no large part in the story of Elsmere’s work in 

North R-. In spite of Robert’s efforts, and against his will, 

the man of meaner gifts and commoner clay was eclipsed by 
that brilliant and persuasive something in Elsmere Avhich a 
kind genius had infused into him at birth. And we shall see 
that in time Robert’s energies took a direction which AVardlaw 




IWBbJRT ELSMERE. 


511 


could not follow with any heartiness. But at the beginning 
Elsinere owed him much, and it was a debt he was never tired 
of honoring. 

In the first place, Wardlaw’s choice of the Elgood Street 
room as a fresh center for civilizing effort had been extremely 
shrewd. The district lying about it, as Robert soon came to 
know, contained a number of promising eleTnents. 

Close by the dingy street which sheltered their school-room 
rose the great pile of a new factory of artistic pottery, a rival 
on the north side of the river to Doulton’s immense works on 
tlie south. The old winding streets near it, and the blocks of 
Avorkmen’s dwellings recently erected under its shadow, were 
largely occupied by the workers in its innumerable floors, and 
among these works’s was a large proportion of skilled artisans, 
men often of a considerable amount of cultivation, earning 
high wages, and maintaining a high standard of comfort. A 
great many of them, trained in the aft school which Murray 
Edwardes had been largely instrumental in establishing within 
easy distance of their houses, Avere men of genuine artistic gifts 
and accomplishment, and as the development of one faculty 
tends on the whole to set others Avorking, Avhen Robert, after a 
four weeks’ Avork in the place, set up a popular historical lec¬ 
ture once a fortnight, announcing the fact b}^ a blue and white 
poster in the school-room Avindows, it was the potters who pro¬ 
vided him Avith his first hearers. 

The rest of the parish Avas divided betAAmen a population of 
dock laborers, settled there to supply the needs of the great dock 
Avhich ran up into the southeastern corner of it, two or three 
huge brcAveries, and a colony of Avatch-makers, an offshoot of 
Clerkenvvell, who lived together in tAA’O or three streets, and 
slioAA'ed the same peculiarites of race and specialized training 
to be noticed in the more notCAVorthy settlement fromAvhich they 
had been thrown off like a swarm from a hive. Outside these 
Avell-deHned trades there Avas, of course, a warehouse popula¬ 
tion, and a mass of heterogeneous cadging and catering Avdiich 
Avent on cliiefly in the riverside streets at the other side of the 
parish from Elgood Street, in the neighborhood of St. Wilfrid’s. 

St. Wilfrid’s at this moment seemed to Robert to be doing a 
very successful work among the lowest strata of the parish. 
From them at one end of the scale, and from the innumerable 
clerks and superintendents who during the day-time crowded 
the vast Avarehouses of Avhich the district Avas full, its Lenten 
ct)ngregations, noAV in full activity, were chiefly drawn. 

The Protestant opposition, Avhich had shoAvn itself so brutally 
and persistently in old days^ aa as noAV^ so far as outAvard inani- 


512 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


festations went, all but extinct. The cassocked, monk-like 
clergy might preach and “ process ” in the open air as much as 
they pleased. The populace, where it was not indifferent, 
was friendly, and devoted living had borne its natural fruits. 

A small incident, which need not be recorded, recalled to 
Elsmere’s mind—after he had been working some six weeks in 
the district—the forgotten, unwelcome fact that St. Wilfrid’s 
was the very church where Newcome, first as senior curate and 
then as vicar, had spent those ten wonderful years into which 
Elsmere at Murewell had been never tired of inquiring. The 
thought of Newcome was a very sore thought. Elsmere had 
written to him announcing his resignation of his living imme¬ 
diately after his interview with the bishop. The letter had re¬ 
mained unanswered, and it was by now tolerably clear that the 
silence of its recipient meant a withdrawal from all friendly re¬ 
lations with the writer. Elsmere’s affectionate,sensitive nature 
took such things hardly,'especially as he knew that Newcome’s 
life was becoming increasingly difiicult and imbittered. And 
it gave him now a fresh pang to imagine how Newcome would 
receive the news of his quondam friend’s “ infidel propa¬ 
ganda,” established on the very ground where he himself had 
all but died for those beliefs Elsmere had thrown over. 

But Robert Avas learning a certain hardness in this London 
life which was not without its uses to character. Hitherto he 
had always swum with the stream, cheered by the support of 
all the great and prevailing English traditions. Here, he and 
his few friends were fighting a solitary fight apart from the 
organized system of English religion and English philan¬ 
thropy. All the elements of culture and religion already 
existing in the place Avere against them. The clergy of St. Wil¬ 
frid’s passed thein Avith cold, averted eyes ; the old and fai- 
neant rector of the parish church very soon let it be knoAvn 
Avhat he thought as to the taste of Elsmere’s intrusion on his 
parish, or as to the eternal chances of tnose Avho might take 
either him or Edwardes as guides in matters religious. His 
enmity did Elgood Street no harm, and the pretensions of the 
Church, in this Babel of 20,000 souls, to cover the whole field, 
bore clearly no relation at all to the facts. But every little in¬ 
cident in this neAV struggle of his life cost Elsmere more perhaps 
than it Avould have cost other men. No part of it came easily 
to him. Only a high Utopian vision drove him on from day 
to day, bracing him to act and judge, if need be, alone and for 
himself, approved only by conscience and the inAvard voice. 

“ Tasks in hours of insight willed 
Can be in hours of gloom fultilled.” 


liOBimT ELSMBllE. 


513 


and it was that moment by the river wliicii worked in liini 
tlirougli all the prosaic and perplexing details of this new 
attempt to carry enthusiasm into life. 

It was soon plain to him that in this teeming section of 
London the chance of the religious reformer lay entirely 
among the iqyper working class. In London, at any rate, all 
that is most prosperous and most intelligent among the work¬ 
ing class holds itself aloof—broadl}^ speaking—from all ex¬ 
isting spiritual agencies, whether Church or Dissent. 

Upon the genuine London artisan the Church has practi¬ 
cally no hold whatever ; and Dissent has nothing like the hold 
which it has on similar material in the great towns of the 
north. Toward religion in general the prevailing attitude is 
one of indifference tinged with hostility. Eight hundred 
thousand people in South London, of whom the enormous 
proportion belong to the Avorking class, and among them, 
Church and Dissent nowhere —Christianity not in possession?'* 
Such is the estimate of an Evangelical of our day ; and similar 
laments come from all parts of the capital. The Londoner is 
on the Avhole more conceited, more prejudiced, more given 
over to crude theorizing, than his north countiy brother, the 
mill-hand, Avhose mere position, as one of a homogeneous and 
tolerably constant body, subjects him to a continuous disci¬ 
pline of intercourse and discussion. Our popular religion, 
broadly speaking, means nothing to him. He is sharp enough 
to see through its contradictions and absurdities ; he has no 
dread of losing Avhat he never valued ; his sense of antiquity, 
of history, is nil^ and his life supplies him with excitement 
enough without the stimulants of “ other-worldliness.” Re¬ 
ligion has been on the . whole irrationally presented to him, 
and the result on his part has been an irrational breach with 
the whole moral and religious order of ideas. 

But the race is quick-witted and imaginative. The Greek 
cities Avhich welcomed and spread Christianity carried Avithin 
them much the same elements as are supplied by certain sec¬ 
tions of the London Avorking class—elements of restlessness, of 
sensibility, of passion. The mere intermingling of races, 
which a modern toAvn shares Avith those old tOAAms of Asia 
Minor, predisposes the mind to a greater openness and recep¬ 
tiveness, Avhether for good or evil. 

As the weeks passed on, and after the first inevitable de¬ 
spondency produced by strange surroundings and an un¬ 
wonted isolation had begun to Avear off, Robert often found 
himself filled Avith a strange flame and ardor of hope. But his 
first steps had nothing to do Avith religion. He made himself 


514 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


quickly felt in the niglit-scliool, and as soon as he possibly 
could he hired a large room at the back of their existing room, 
on the same floor, where, on the recreation evenings, he might 
begin the story-telling, which had been so great a success at 
Murewell. The story-telling struck the neighborhood as a 
great novelty. At first only a few youths straggled in from 
the front room, where dominoes and draughts and the illus¬ 
trated papers held seductive sway. The next night the num¬ 
ber was increased, and by the fourth or fifth evening the room 
was so well filled both by boys and a large contingent of arti¬ 
sans, that it seemed well to appoint a special evening in the 
week for story-telling, or the recreation-room would have been 
deserted. 

In these performances Elsmere’s aim had alwaj^s been two¬ 
fold—the rousing of moral sympathy and the awakening of the 
imaginative power pure and simple. lie ranged the whole 
world for stories. Sometimes it would be merely some feature 
of London life itself—the history of a great fire, for instance, 
with its hair-breadth escapes ; a collision in the river ; a string 
of instances as true and homely and realistic as they could be 
made of the way in which the poor help one another. Some¬ 
times it would be stories illustrating the dangers and difficul¬ 
ties of particular trades—a collieiy explosion and the daring of 
the rescuers ; incidents from the life of the great northern iron¬ 
works, or from that of the Lancashire factories ; or stories of 
English country life and its humors, given sometimes in dia¬ 
lect—Devonshire, or Yorkshire, or Cumberland—for which he 
had a special gift. Or, again, he would take the sea and its 
terrors—the immortal story of the “ Birkenhead the deadly 
plunge of the “ Captain the records of the life-boats, or the 
fascinating story of the ships of science, exploring step by 
step, through miles of water, the past, the inhabitants, the hills 
and valleys of that underworld, that vast Atlantic bed, in 
which Mont Blanc might be buried without showing even his 
topmost snow-field above the plain of waves. Then at other 
times it would be the simple frolic and fancy of fiction—fairy 
tale and legend, Greek myth or Icelandic saga, episodes from 
Walter Scott, from Cooper, from Dumas ; to be followed per¬ 
haps on the next evening hy the terse and vigorous biography 
of some man of the people—of Stephenson or Cobden, of Tliorn- 
as Cooper or John Bright, or even of Thomas Carlyle. 

One evening, some weeks after it had begun, Hugh Flax- 
mae, hearing from Rose of the success of the experiment, went 
down to hear his new acquaintance tell the story of Monte 
Cristo’s escape from the (liateau dTf. He started an hour 


ROBEnT ELSMERE. 


515 


earlier than was necessary, and with an admirable impartiality 
he spent that hour at St. Wilfred’s hearing vespers. Flaxman 
had a passion for intellectual or social novelty ; and this j)assi()n 
was beguiling him into a close observation of Elsmere. At the 
same time he was crossed and complicated by all sorts of fas¬ 
tidious conservative fibers, and when his friends talked ration¬ 
alism it often gave him a vehement jDleasure to maintain that a 
good Catholic or Ritualist service was worth all their argu¬ 
ments, and would outlast them. His taste drew him to the 
Church, so did a love of opposition to current “ isms.” Bishops 
counted on him for subscriptions, and High Church divines 
sent him their pamphlets. He never refused the subscriptions, 
but it should be added that with equal regularity he dropped 
the pamphlets into his waste-paper basket. Altogether a not 
very decipherable person in religious matters—as Rose had 
already discovered. 

The change from the dim and perfumed spaces of St. Wil¬ 
frid’s to the bare warehouse room with its packed rows of 
listeners was striking enough. Here were no bowed figures, 
no recueillement. In the blaze of crude light every eager eye 
was fixed upon the slight, elastic figure on the platform, each 
change in the expressive face, each gesture of the long arms 
and thin flexible hands, finding its response in the laughter, 
the attentive silence, the frowning suspense of the audience. 
At one point a band of young roughs at the back made a dis¬ 
turbance, but their neighbors had the offenders quelled and out 
in a twinkling, and the room cried out for a repetition of 
the sentences which had been lost in the noise. When 
Dantes, opening his knife with his teeth, managed to cut the 
strings of the sack, a grasp of relief ran through the crowd ; 
when at last he reached terra Jirma there w^as a ringing 
cheer. 

‘‘ What is he, d’ye know ?” Flaxman heard a mechanic ask 
his neighbor, as Robert paused for a moment to get breath, the 
man jerking a grimy thumb in the story-teller’s direction mean¬ 
while. “ Seems like a parson somehow. But he ain’t a parson.” 

“ Not he,” said the other laconically. “ Knows better. Most 
of ’em as comes down here ’ere stuffs all they have to say as 
full of goody-goody as an egg’s full of meat. If he wur that 
sort you wouldn’t catch me here. Never lieard him say any¬ 
thing in the ‘ dear brethren ’ sort of style, and I’ve been ’ere 
most o’ these evenings and to his lectures besides.” 

“ Perhaps he’s one of your d—d sly ones,” said the first 
speaker dubiously. “ Means to shovel it in by and by.” 

“Well, I don’t know as I couldn’t stand it if he did,” re- 


516 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


turned his companion. “ He’d let other fellows have their saj", 
anyhow.” 

Flaxman looked curiously at the speaker. He was a young 
man, a gas-fitter—to judge by the contents of the basket he 
seemed to have brought in with him on his way from work— 
with eyes like live birds’, and small, emaciated features. Dur¬ 
ing the story Flaxman had noticed the man’s thin, begrimed 
hand, as it rested on the bench in front of him, trembling with 
excitement. 

Another project of Robert’s, started as soon as he had felt 
his way a little in the district, was the scientific Sunday-school. 
This was the direct result of a paragraph in Huxley’s “ Lay 
Sermons,” Avhere the hint of such a school was first thrown out. 
However, since the introduction of science teaching into the 
Board schools, the novelty and necessity of such a supplement 
to a child’s ordinary education is not what it was. Robert 
set it up mainly for the sake of drawing the boys out of the 
streets in the afternoons and providing them with some other 
food for fancy and delight than larking and smoking and 
penny dreadfuls. A little simple chemical and electrical ex¬ 
periment went down greatly ; so did a botany class, to whicli 
Elsmere would come armed with two stores of flowers, one to 
be picked to pieces, the other to be distributed according to 
memory and attention. A year before he had a number of 
large colored plates of tropical fruits and flowers prepared for 
him by a Kew assistant. These he would often set up on a 
large screen, or put upon the walls, till the dingy school-room 
became a bower of superb blossom and luxuriant leaf, a glow 
of red and purple and orange. And then—still by the help of 
pictures—he would take his class on a tour through strange 
lands, talking to them or China or Egypt or South America, 
till they followed him up the Amazon, or into the pjn-amids, or 
through the Pampas, or into the m^^sterious buried cities of 
Mexico, as the children of Hamelin followed the magic of the 
Pied Piper. 

Hardly any of those who came to him, adults or children, 
while almost all of the artisan class, were of the poorest class. 
He knew it, and had laid his plans for such a result. Such 
Avork as he had at heart has no chance Avith the loAvest in the 
social scale, in its beginnings. It must have something to 
work upon, and must penetrate doAviiAvard. He only can re¬ 
ceive who already hath—there is no profounder axiom. 

And meanwhile the months passed on, and he AA^as still 
brooding, still Avaiting. At last the spark fell. 

There, in the next street but one to Elgood Street, rose the 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


617 


famous Workmen’s Club of North R-. It had been started 

by a former Liberal clergyman of the parish, whose main 
object, however, had been to train the workmen to manage it 
for themselves, llis training had been, in fact, too successful. 
Not only was it now wholly managed by artisans, but it had 
come to be a center of active, nay, brutal, opposition to the 
Church and faith which had originally fos*tered it. In organic 
connection with it was a large debating hall, in which the 
most notorious secularist lecturers held forth every Sunday 
evening ; and next door to it, under its shadow and patronage, 
was a little dingy shop filled to overflowing with the coarsest 
free-thinking publications, Colonel Ingersoll’s books occupy¬ 
ing the place of honor in the window and the “ Freethinker ” 
jjlacard flaunting at the door. Inside there was still more 
highly seasoned literature even than the “ Freethinker ” to be 
had. There was in particular a small half-penny paper which 
was understood to be in some sense the special organ of the 

North R-Club ; which was at any rate published close by, 

and edited by one of the workmen founders of the club. This 
unsavory sheet began to be more and more defiantly advertised 
through the parish as Lent drew on toward Passion week, and 
the exertions of St. Wilfrid’s and of the other churches, which 
were being spurred on by the R’ ualists’ success, became more 
apparent. Soon it seemed to Robert that every bit of board¬ 
ing and every waste wall was filled with the announcement : 

“ Read ‘ Faith and Fools.’ Enormous success. Our ‘ Comic 
Life of Christ ’ now nearly completed. Quite the best thing 
of its kind going. AVood-cut this week—Transfiguration.” 

His heart grew fierce within him. One night in Passion 
week he left the night-school about ten o’clock. Ilis way led 
him past the club, which was brilliantly lighted up and evi¬ 
dently in full activity. Round the door there was a knot of 
workmen lounging. It was a mild moonlighted April night, 
and the air was pleasant. Several of them had copies of 
“ Faith and Fools,” and were showing the week’s wood-cut to 
those about them, with chuckles and spurts of laughter. 

Robert caught a few words as he hurried past them, and 
stirred by a sudden impulse turned into the shop bejmnd, and 
asked for the paper. The woman handed it to him, and gave 
liim his change with a business-like mng froid, which struck 
on llis tired nerves almost more painfully than the laughing 
brutality of the men he had just passed. 

Directh" he found himself in another street he opened the 
paper under a lanip-]>ost. It contained a caricature of the 
Crucifixion, tlie scroll emanating from Mary Magdalene’^ 




518 


ROBER1 ' ELSMERE. 


moiitb, in particular, containing obscenities which can not be 
quoted here. 

Robert thrust it into his pocket and strode on, every nerve 
quivering. 

“ This is Wednesday in Passion week,” he said to himself. 
“ The day after to-morrow is Good Friday ! ” 

He walked fast in a northwesterly direction, and soon found 
himself within the city, where the streets were long since 
empty and silent. But he noticed nothing around him. His 
thoughts were in the distant East, among the flat roofs and 
white walls of Nazareth, the olives of Bethany, the steep streets 
and rocky ramparts of Jerusalem. He had seen them with the 
bodily eye, and the fact had enormously quickened his historical 
perception. The child of Nazareth, the moralist and teacher 
of Capernaum and Gennesaret, the strenuous seer and martyr of 
the later Jerusalem preaching—all these various images sprang 
into throbbing, poetic life within him. That anything in hu¬ 
man shape should be found capable of dragging this life and 
this death through the mire of a hideous and befouling laughter! 
Who was responsible ? To what cause could one trace such a 
temper of mind toward such an object—present and militant 
as that temper is in all the crowded centers of working life 
throughout modern Europe? The toiler of the world as he 
matures may be made to love Socrates or Buddha or INfarcus 
Aurelius. It would seem often as though he could not be 
made to love Jesus? Is it the Nemesis that ultimately dis¬ 
covers and avenges the subliniest, the least conscious departure 
from simplicity and verit}^?—is it the last and most terrible 
illustration of a great axiom : “ Faith has a judge—in truth ! ” 

He went home and lay awake half the night pondering. If 
he could but pour out his heart ! But though Catherine, the 
wife of his heart, of his j-outh, is there, close beside him, 
doubt and struggle and perplexit}^ are alike frozen on his lips. 
He can not speak without sympathy, and she will not hear ex¬ 
cept under a moral compulsion which he shrinks more and 
more painfully from exercising. 

The next night was a story-telling night. He spent it in 
telling the legend of St. Francis. When it was over he asked 
the audience to wait a moment, and there and then—with the 
tender, imaginative Franciscan atmosphere, as it were, still 
about them—he delivered a short and vigorous protest in the 
name of decency, good feeling and common sense, against the 
idiotic profanities with which the whole immediate neighbor¬ 
hood seemed to be reeking. It Avas the first time he had ap¬ 
proached any religious matter directly. A knot of Avorkmen 


nOBERT ELS.VERE. 


519 


sitting togetlier at the back of the room looked at each other 
with a significant grimace or two. 

When Robert ceased speaking one of them, an elderly watch¬ 
maker, got np and made a dry and cynical little speech, noth¬ 
ing moving but the thin lips in the shriveled mahogany face. 
Robert knew the man well. He was a Genevese by birtli. 
Calvinist by blood, revolutionist by development. He com¬ 
plained that Mr. Elsmere had taken his audience by surprise ; 
that a good many of those present understood the remarks he 
had just made as an attack upon an institution in which many 
of them were deeply interested ; and that he invited Mr. Els¬ 
mere to a more thorough discussion of the matter in a place 
where he could be both heard and answered. 

The room applauded with some signs of suppressed excite¬ 
ment. Most of the men were accustomed to disputation of 
the sort which any Sunday visitor to Victoria Park may hear 
going on there week after week. Elsmere had made a vivid 
impression ; and the prospect of a fight with him had an un¬ 
usual piquancy. 

Robert sprang up. When you will,” he said. “ I am 
ready to stand by what I have just said in the face of you all, 
if you care to hear it.” 

Place and particulars were hastily arranged, subject to the 
approval of the club committee, and Elsmere’s audience sep¬ 
arated in a glow of curiosity and expectation. 

“ Didn’t I tell ye ? ” the gas-fitter’s snarling friend said to 
him. “ Scratch him and you find the parson. These upper- 
class folk, when they come among us poor ones, always seem 
to me just hunting for souls, as those Injuns he was talking 
about last week hunt for scalps. They can’t get to heaven 
without a certain number of ’em slung about ’em.” 

Wait a bit ! ” said the gas-fitter, his quick, dark eyes be¬ 
traying a certain raised inner temperature. 

Next morning the North R-Club was placarded with 

announcements that on Easter-eve next Robert Elsmere, Esq., 
would deliver a lecture in the Debating Hall on “ The Claim 
of Jesus upon Modern Life,” to be followed, as usual, by gen¬ 
eral discussion. 


CHAPd’ER XXXIX. 

It was the afternoon of Good Friday. Catherine had been 
to church at St. Paul’s, and Robert, though not without some 
inward struggle, had accompanied her. Their midday meal 
was over, and Robert had been devoting himself to MaTy^ who 
had been tottering round the room in his wake, clutching one 



nOBFAir ELSUERF. 


520 

finger tight with her chubby hand. In particnlai’, he liad been 
coaxing her into friendship witli a wooden Japanese dragon 
wliich wound itself in awful ^^etmost seductive coils round the 
cabinet at the end of the room. It was Mary’s weekly task to 
embrace this horror, and the performance went by the name 
of “ kissing the Jabberwock.” It had been triumphantly 
achieved, and, as the reward of bravery, Maiy was being car¬ 
ried round the room on her father’s shoulder, holding on mer¬ 
cilessly to his curls, her shining blue eyes darting scorn at the 
defeated monster. 

At last Robert deposited her on the rug beside a fascinating 
farm-yard which lay there spread out for her, and stood look¬ 
ing, not at the child, but at his wife. 

“ Cathei'ine, I feel so mucli as Mary did three minutes ago ! ” 

She looked up startled. The tone was light, but the sad¬ 
ness, the emotion of the eyes, contradicted it. 

“I want courage,” he went on—“ courage to tell you some¬ 
thing that may hurt you. And jmt I ought to tell it.” 

Her face took the shrinking expression which was so painful 
to him. But she waited quietly for what he had to sav. 

“You know, I think,” he said, looking away from her to 

the gray museum outside, “ that my work in R-hasn’t 

been religious as yet at all. Oh, of course, I have said things 
hei-e and there, but I haven’t delivered myself in any wa}^ 
Now there has come an opening.” 

And he described to her—while she shivered a little and 
drew herself together—the provocations which were leading 
him into a tussle with the North R-Club. 

“ The}^ have given me a very civil invitation. They are the 
sort of men, after all, whom it p.ays to get hold of, if one can. 
Among their fellows they are the"men Who think. One longs 
to helj) them to think to a little more ])urpose” 

“ What have you to give them, Robert ? ” asked Catherine, 
after a pause, her eyes bent on the child’s stockings she was 
knitting. Her heart was full enough already, poor soul. Oh, 
the bitterness of this Passion week ! He had been at her side 
often in church, but through all his tender silence and con¬ 
sideration she had divined the constant struggle in him between 
love and intellectual honesty,and it had filled her with a dumb 
irritation and misery indescribable. Do what she would, 
Avrestle Avith herself as she Avould, there Avas constantly emerg¬ 
ing in her noAV a note of anger, not Avith Robert, but, 
as it Avere, Avith those malign forces of Avhich he Avas the 
prey. 

“ What have I to give them ? ” he repeated sadly. “Very 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 


521 


little, Catherine, as it seenis to me to-iiiolit. But come ami 
see.” 

llis tone had a melancholy which went to her heart. In 
reality he was in that state of de])ression which often precedes 
a great effort. But she was startled by his suggestion. 

“ Come with you, Robert ? To the meeting of a secularist 
club?” 

“ Why not? I shall be there to protest against outrage to 
what both you and I hold dear. And the men are decent fel¬ 
lows. There will be no disturbance.” 

“ What are you going to do ? ” she asked in a low voice. 

“ I have been trying to think it out,” he said with difficulty. 
“I want simply, if I can, to transfer to their minds that image 
of Jesus of Nazareth which thought, and love, and i-eading 
have left upon my own. I want to make them realize for 
themselves the historical character, so far as it can be realized— 
to make them see for themselves the real figure, as it went 
in and out among men—so far as our eyes can now discern it.” 

The word came quicker towards the end, while the voice 
sank—took the vibrating, characteristic note the wife knew 
so well. 

‘‘IIow can that help them?” she said abruptly. “Your 
historical Christ, Robert, will never win souls. If he was God 
every word you speak will insult him. If he was man he was 
not a good man.” 

“ Come and see,” was all he said, holding out his hand to 
her. It was in some sort a renewal of the scene at Les Avants, 
the inevitable renewal of an offer he felt bound to make and 
she felt bound to resist. 

She let her knitting fall and jdaced her hand in his. The 
baby on the rug was alternately caressing and scourging a 
woolly baa-lamb, which was the fetish of her childish worship. 
I [er broken incessant baby-talk, and the ringing kisses with 
which she atoned to the baa-lamb for each successive outrage, 
made a running accompaniment to the moved under-tones of 
the parents. 

“ Don’t ask me, Robert; don’t ask me ! Do you want me 
to come and sit thinking of last Easter-eve ? ” 

“ Heaven knows I was miserable enough last Easter-eve,” 
he said slowlj^ 

“ And now,” she exclaimed, looking at him with a sudden 
agitation of every feature, “now you are not miserable ! You 
are quite confident and sure? You are going to devote your 
life to attacking the few remnants of faith that still remain in 
the world ? ” 


522 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Never in her married life had slie spoken to him with this 
accent of bitterness and hostility. He started and witlidrew 
his hand, and there was a silence. 

“I held once a wife in my arms,” he said presently, with a 
voice hardly audible, “ who said to me that she would never 
persecute her husband. But what is persecution if it is not 
the determination not to understand?” 

She buried her face in her hands. “ I could not under¬ 
stand,” she said somberly. 

“And rather than try,” he insisted, “you will go on believ¬ 
ing that I am a man without faith, seeking onl}^ to destroy.” 

“I know you think you have faith,” she answered, “ but 
how can it seem faith to me ? ‘ He that Avill not confess me 

before men, him will I also deii}^ before my Father Avhich is in 
heaven.’ Your belief seems to me more dangerous than these 
horrible things which shock you. For you can make it at¬ 
tractive, you can make it loved, as you once made the faith of 
Christ loved.” 

He was silent. She raised her face presentl}^, whereon were 
the traces of some of those quiet, difficult tears which were 
characteristic of her, and went softly out of the room. 

He stood a while leaning against the mantel-piece, deaf to. 
little Mary’s clamor, and to her occasional clutches at liis 
knees, as she tried to raise herself on her tiny tottering feet. 
A sense as though of some fresh disaster was upon him. His 
heart was sinking, sinking within him. And yet none knew 
better than he that there was nothing fresh. It was merely 
that the scene had recalled to him anew some of those un¬ 
palatable truths which the optimist is always much too ready 
to forget. 

Heredity, the molding force of circumstance, the iron hold 
of the past upon the present—a man like Elsmere realizes the 
working of these things in other men’s lives with a singular 
subtlety and clearness, and is forever overlooking them, run¬ 
ning his head against them, in his own. 

He turned and laid his arms on the chimney-piece, burying 
his head on them. Suddenly he felt a touch on his knee, and, 
looking down, saw Mary peering up, her masses of dark hair 
streaming back from the straining little face, the grave open 
mouth and alarmed eyes. 

“ Fader, tiss ! fader, tiss ! ” she said imperatively. 

He lifted her up and covered tlie little brown cheeks with 
kisses. But the touch of the child only woke in him a fresh 
dread—the like of something he had often divined of late in 
Catherine. Was she actually afraid now that he might feel 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


523 


himself bound in future to take her child spiritually from 
her ? The suspicion of such a fear in her woke in him a fresh 
anguisli ; it seemed a measure of the distance they had traveled 
from that old perfect unity. 

“ She thinks I could even become in time her tyrant and 
torturer,” he said to himself, with measureless pain, “ and who 
knows—who can answer for himself ? Oh, the puzzle of living!” 

When she came back into the room, pale and quiet, Cath¬ 
erine said nothing, and Robert went to his letters. But after 
awhile she opened his study door. 

“ Robert, will you tell me what your stories are to be next 
week, and let me put out the pictures ? ” 

It was the first time she had made any such offer. He 
sprang up with a flash in his gray eyes, and brought her a slip 
of paper with a list. She took it without looking at him. 
But he caught her in his arms, and for a moment in that 
embrace the soreness of both hearts passed away. 

But if Catherine would not go, Elsmere was not left on this 
critical occasion without auditors from his own immediate 
circle. On the evening of Good Friday Flaxman had found 
his way to Bedford Square, and, as Catherine was out, was 
shown into Elsmere’s study. 

“ I have come,” he announced, “ to try and persuade you and 
Mrs. Elsmere to go down with me to Greenlaws to-morrow, 
Easter party has come to grief, and it would be a real 
charity on your part to come and resuscitate it. Do ! You 
look abominably fagged, and as if some country would do 
3^11 good.” 

But I thought—” began Robert, taken aback. 

“ You thought,” repeated Flaxman coolly, “ that 3’'Our two 
sisters-in-law were going down there with Lady Helen, to 
meet some musical folk. Well, they are not coming. Miss 
Ley burn thinks your mother-in-law not very well to-day, and 
doesn’t like to come. And your younger sister prefers also to 
stay in town. Helen is much disappointed, so am I. But—” 
ami he shrugged his shoulders. 

Robert found it difficult to make a suitable remark. His 
sisters-in-law were certainly inscrutable young women. This 
Easter party at Greenlaws, Mr. Flaxman’s country-house, had 
been planned, he knew, for Aveeks. And certainl3^ nothing 
could be very wrong with Mrs. Leyburn, or Catherine would 
have been Avarned. 

“ 1 am afraid your plans must be greatly put out,” he said, 
Avith some embarrassment. 


524 


ROBERT EL^MERE. 


Of course they are,” replied Flaxinaii with a diy smile. 
He stood opposite Elsmere, his bauds in his pockets. 

“Will you have a confidence?” the bright eyes seemed to 
say. “ I am quite ready. Claim it if you like.” 

Hut Elsmere had no intention of claiming it. The position of 
all Rose’s kindred, indeed, at the present moment was not easy. 
None of them had the least knowledge of Rose’s mind. Had 
she forgotten Langham ? Had she lost her lieart afresh to 
Elaxman ? No one knew. Flaxman’s absorption in her Avas 
clear enough. But his love-making, if it was su.ch, was not of 
an ordinary kind, and did not always explain itself. And, 
moreover, his wealth and social position were elements in the 
situation calculated to make people like the Elsmeres particu¬ 
larly diffident and discreet. Impossible for them, much as 
they liked him, to make any of the advances. 

No, Robert wanted no confidences. He was not prepared to 
take the responsibility of them. So, letting Rose alone, he 
took up his visitor’s invitatioii to themselves, and explained 
the engagement for Easter-eve, which tied them to London. 

“ Whew! ” said Hugh Elaxman, “ but that will be a shindy 
worth seeing. I must come ! ” 

“ Nonsense ! ” said Robert, smiling. “ Go down to Green- 
laws, and go to church. That will be much more in your 
line.” 

“ As for church,” said Elaxman, meditatively, “ If I put off 
my party altogether, and stay in town, there Avill be this fur¬ 
ther advantage, that, after hearing you on Saturday night, I 
can, with blameless impartiality, spend the following day in 
St. Andrew’s Well Street. Yes ! I telegraph to Helen—she 
knows my Avays—and I come down to protect you against an 
atheistical mob to-morroAV night ! ” 

Robert tried to dissuade him. He did not Avant Elaxman. 
Elaxman’s Epicureanism, the easy tolerance Avith wliich, moav 
that the effervescence of his youth had subsided, the man har¬ 
bored and dallied Avith a dozen contradictory beliefs, were at 
times peculiarly antipathetic to Elsmere. They Avere so now, 
just as heart and soul Avei*e nerved to an effort Avhich could not 
be made at all without the nobler sort of self-confidence. 

But Elaxman was determined, 

“ No,” “ he said ; this one day we’ll give—to heresy. Don’t 
look so forbidding ! In the first place you Avon’t see me : in 
the next, if yon did, you Avould feel me as wax in your hands. 
I am like the man in Sophocles—always the possession of the 
last speaker ! One day I am all for the Church. A certain 
number of chances in the hundred there still ai-e, you will ad- 


nOBEUr ELSMERE. 


.^25 

mit, that she is in the riglit of it. And if so, why should I cut 
myself off from a whole host of beautiful things not to be got 
outside her ? But the next day —vive Elsmere and the Revo¬ 
lution. If only Elsmere could persuade me intellectually ! 
But I never yet came across a religious novelty that seemed to 
me to have a leg of logic to stand on ! ” 

He laid his hand on Robert’s shoulder,* his eyes twinkling 
with a sudden energy. Robert made no answer. He stood 
erect, frowning a little, his hands thrust far into the pockets of 
his light-gray coat. He was in no mood to disclose himself to 
Flaxman. The inner vision was fixed with extraordinary in¬ 
tensity on quite another sort of antagonist, with whom the 
mind was continuously grappling. 

“ Ah, well—till to-morrow ! ” said Flaxman with a smile, 
shook hands, and went. 

Outside he hailed a cab and drove off to Lady Charlotte’s. 

He found his aunt and Mr. Wynnstay in the drawing-room 
alone, one on either side of the fire. Lady Charlotte was read¬ 
ing the latest political biography with an apparent profundity 
of attention ; Mr. Wynnstay was lounging and caressing the 
cat. But both his aunt’s absorption and Mr. Wynnstay’s non¬ 
chalance seemed to Flaxman overdone. He suspected a do¬ 
mestic breeze. 

Lady Charlotte made him effusively welcome. He had 
come to propose that she should accompany him the following 
evening to hear Elsmere lecture. 

“ I advise you to come,” he said. “ Elsmere will deliver his 
soul, and the amount of soul he lias to deliver in these dull 
days is astounding. A dowdy dress and a veil, of course. I 
will go down beforehand and see some one on the spot, in case 
there should be difficulties about getting in. Perhaps Miss 
Leyburn, too, might like to hear her brotlicr-in-law ? ” 

“ Really^ Hugh,” cried Lady Charlotte impatiently, “ I 
think you might take your snubbing with dignity. Her re¬ 
fusal this morning to go to Greenlaws was brusqueness itself. 
To my mind that young person gives herself airs ! ” And the 
Duke of Sedbergli’s sister drew herself up with a rustle of all 
her ample frame. 

“Yes, I was snubbed,” said Flaxman, unperturbed ; “that, 
liowever, is no reason why she shouldn’t find it attractive to 
go to-morrow night.” 

“And you will let her see that, just because you couldn’t 
get hold of her, you have given up your Easter party and left 
your sister in the lurch ?” 

“ I never had excessive notions of dignity,” he replied com- 


520 


ROBERT EL8MERE, 


posedly. “ You may make uj) any story you please. Tlie 
real fact is that I want to hear Elsmere.” 

“ You had better go, my dear ! ” said her husband, sardonic¬ 
ally. “ I can not imagine anything more piquant than an 
atheistic slum on Easter-eve.” 

“ Nor can I ! ” she replied, her combativeness rousing at 
once. “ Much obliged to you, Hugh. I will borrow my house¬ 
keeper’s dress, and be ready to leave here at half-past seven.” 

Nothing more was said of Rose, but Flaxnian knew that 
she would be asked, and let it alone. 

“Will his wife be there ? ” asked Lady Charlotte. 

“ Who ? Elsmere’s ? My dear aunt when you happen to 
be the orthodox wife of a rising heretic, your husband’s opin¬ 
ions are not exactly the spectacular performance they are to 
you and me. I should think it most unlikely.” 

“ Oh, she persecutes him, does she ?” 

“ She wouldn’t be a woman if she didn’t ! ” observed IMr. 
Wynnstay, sotto voce. The small, dark man Avas lost in a 
great arm-chair, his delicate painter’s hands playing Avith the 
fur of a huge Persian cat. Lady Charlotte threAv him an eagle 
glance, and he subsided—for the moment. 

Flaxman, hoAvever, was perfectly right. There had been a 
breeze. It had been just announced to the master of the house 
by his spouse that certain Socialistic celebrities—Avho might 
any day be expected to make acquaintance Avith the police— 
Avere coming to dine at his table, to finger his spoons and mix 
their diatribes with his champagne, on the following Tuesday. 
Overt rebellion had never served him yet, and he knew per¬ 
fectly well that Avhen it came to the point he should smile 
more or less affably upon these gentry, as he had smiled upon 
others of the same sort before. But it liad not yet come to the 
point, and his intermediate state Avas explosive in the extreme. 

Mr. Flaxman dexterously continued the subject of the Eis- 
meres. Dropping his bantering tone he delivered himself of a 
very delicate critical analysis of Catherine Elsmere’s tcm])cra- 
ment and position, as in the course of several months his in¬ 
timacy Avith her husband had revealed them to him. He did 
it AA^ell, with acuteness and philosophical relish. The situation 
presented itself to him as an extremely refined and yet tragic 
phase of the religious difficulty, and it gave him intellectual 
pleasure to draw it out in words. 

Lad}" Charlotte sat listening, enjoying her nepheAv’s crisp 
phrases, but also gradually gaining a perception of the human 
reality behind this Avord-play of Ilugh’s. That “good heart” 
of hers Avas touched ; the large imperious face began to frown. 


noBmr blsmeupi 


52V 


Dear mo!” she said with a little sigh. ‘‘Don’t go on, 
Hugh. I suppose it’s because we all of us believe so little that 
the poor thing’s point of view seems to one so unreal. All the 
same, however,” she added, regaining her usual role of magis¬ 
terial common sense, “ a woman, in my opinion, ought to go 
with her husband in religious matters.” 

“ Provided, of course, she sets him at naught in all others,” 
put in Mr. Wyiinstay, rising and daintil}" depositing the cat. 
“ Many men, however, my dear, might be willing to compro¬ 
mise it differently. Granted a certain modicum of woi-idly 
conformity, they would not be at all indisposed to a conscience 
clause.” 

He lounged out of the room, while Lady Charlotte shrugged 
her shoulders with a look at her nephew in which there was 
an irrepressible twinkle. Mr. Flaxnian neither heard nor saw. 
Life would have ceased to be worth having long ago had he 
ever taken sides in the smallest degree in this menage. 

Flaxnian walked home again, not particularly satished Avitli 
himself and his maneuvers. Very likely it was quite unwise of 
him to have devised another meeting between himself and Rose 
Leyburn so soon. Certainly she had snubbed him—there 
could be no doubt of that. Nor was he in much perplexity as 
to the reason. He had been forgetting himself, forgetting his 
role and the whole lay of the situation, and if a man will be an 
idiot he must suffer for it. He had distinctly been put back a 
move. 

The facts were very simple. It was now nearly three months 
since Langham’s disappearance. During that time Rose Ley- 
burn had been, to Flaxman’s mind, enchantingly dependent on 
him. He had played his part so well, and the beautiful high- 
spirited child had suited herself so naively to his acting ! Evi¬ 
dently she had said to herself that his age, his former marriage, 
his relation to Lady Helen, his constant kindness to her and 
her sister, made it natural that she should trust him, make him 
her friend, and allow him an intimacy she allowed to no other 
male friend. And when once the situation had been so defined 
in her mind, how the girl’s true self had come out!—what de¬ 
lightful moments that intimacy had contained for him. 

He remembered how on one occasion he had been reading 
some Browning to her and Helen, in Helen’s crowded, belii- 
tered drawing-room, which seemed all piano and photographs 
and lilies of the valley. He never could exactly trace the con¬ 
nection between the passage he had been reading and what hap¬ 
pened. Probably it was merely Browning’s poignant, j)assion- 
ate note that had affected her. In spite of all her proud, bright 


528 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


reserve, both he and Helen often felt through these weeks that 
just below this surface there was a heart which quivered at the 
least touch. He finished the lines and laid down the book. 
Lady Helen heard her three-year-old boy crying uj)stairs, and 
ran up to see what was the matter. He and Rose were left 
alone in the scented, fire-lighted room. And a jet of flame 
suddenly showed him the girl’s face turned away, convulsed 
with a momentary struggle for self-control. She raised a hand 
an instant to her eyes, not dreaming evidently tliat she could 
be seen in the dimness ; and her gloves dropped from her lap. 

He moved forward, stooped on one knee, and as she held 
out her hand for the gloves, he kissed the hand very gently, 
detaining it afterward as a brother might. There was not a 
thought of himself in his mind. Simply he could not bear that 
so bright a creature should ever be sorry. It seemed to him 
intolerable, against the nature of things. If he could have pro¬ 
cured for her at that moment a coerced and transformed Lang- 
ham, a Langham fitted to make her happy he could almost 
have done it ; and, short of such radical consolation, the very 
least he could do was to go on his knee to her, and comfort her 
in tender brotherly fashion. 

She did not say anything ; she let her hand stay a moment, 
and then she got up, put on her veil, left a quiet message for 
Lady Helen, and departed. But as he put her into a hansom 
her whole manner to him was full of a shy, shrinking sweet¬ 
ness. And when Rose was shy and shinking she was adorable. 

Well, and now he had never again gone nearly so far as to 
kiss her hand, and yet because of an indiscreet moment eveiy- 
thing was changed between them ; she had turned resentful, 
stand-off, nay, as nearly rude as a girl under the restraints of 
modern manners can manage to be. He almost laughed as he 
recalled Helen’s report of her interview with Rose that morn¬ 
ing, in which she had tried to persuade a young person out¬ 
rageously on her dignit}^ to keep an engagement she had her¬ 
self spontaneous!}" made. 

“ I am very sorry, Lady Helen,” Rose had said, her slim 
figure drawn up so stiffly that the small Lady Helen felt her¬ 
self totally effaced beside her. “ But I had rather not leave 
London this week. I think I will stay with mamma and 
Agnes.” 

And nothing Lady Helen could say moved her or modified 
her formula or refusal. 

“ What have you been doing, Hugh ? ” his sister asked him, 
half dismayed, half provoked. 

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders and vowed he had been 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


529 


doing nothing. But, in truth, he knew very well that the day 
before he had overstepped the line. There had been a little 
scene between them, a quick })assage of speech, a rash look and 
gesture on his part, which had been quite unpremeditated, but 
whicn had nevertheless transformed their relation. Rose had 
flushed up, had said a few incoherent words, which he had un¬ 
derstood to be words of reproach, had left Lady Helen’s as 
quickly as possible, and next morning his Greenlaws party 
had fallen through. 

“ Check, certainly,” said Flaxman to himself, ruefully, as 
he pondered these circumstances—‘‘ not mate, I hope, if one 
can but find out how not to be a fool in future.” 

And over his solitary fire he meditated far into the night. 

Next day, at half-past seven in the evening, he entered Lady 
Charlotte’s drawing-room, gayer, brisker, more alert than 
ever. 

Rose started visibly at the sight of him, and shot a quick 
glance at the unblushing Lady Charlotte. 

“ I thought you were at Greenlaws,” she conld not help say¬ 
ing to him, as she coldly offered him her hand. TFAy had 
Lady Charlotte never told her he was to escort them ? Her 
irritation rose anew. 

“ What can one do,” he said lightly, “ if Elsmere will fix 
such a performance for Easter-eve ? My party was at its last 
gasp too ; it only wanted a telegram to Helen to give it its 
coKp de grdce?'^ 

Rose flushed up, but he turned on his heel at once, and be¬ 
gan to banter his aunt on the housekeeper’s bonnet and veil in 
which she had a little too obviously disguised herself. 

And certainly, in the drive to the East End, Rose had no 
reeson to complain of importunity on his part. Most of the 
way he was deep in talk with Lady Charlotte as to a certain 
loan exhibition in the East End, to Avhich he and a good many 
of his friends were sending pictures ; apparently his time and 
thoughts were entirely occupied with it. Rose, leaning back 
silent in her corner, was presently seized with a little shock of.- 
surprise that there should be so many interests and relations in 
his life of which she knew nothing. He was talking now as 
the man of possessions and influence. She saw a glimpse of 
him as he was in his public aspect, and the kindness, the disin¬ 
terestedness, the quiet sense, and the humor of his talk insen¬ 
sibly affected her as she sat listening, d’he mental image of 
him which had been dominant in her mind altered a little. 
Kay, she grew a little hot over it. She asked herself scorn¬ 
fully whether she were not as ready as any bread-and-butter 


530 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


miss of her acquaintance to imagine every man she knew in 
love with her. 

Very likely he had meant what he said quite differently, and 
she—oh ! humiliation—had flown into a passion with him for 
no reasonable cause. Supposing he had meant, two days ag*o, 
that if they were to go on being friends she must let him be her 
lover too, it would of course have been unpardonable. How 
coidd she let any one talk to her of love yet—especially Mr. 
Flaxman, who guessed, as she was quite sure, what had hap¬ 
pened to her ? He must despise her to have imagined it. His 
outburst had filled her with the oddest and most petulant re¬ 
sentment. Were all men self-saeking ? Did all men think 
women shallow and fickle ? Could a man and woman never 
be honestly and simply friends ? If he had made love to her, 
he could not possibly—and there was the sting of it—feel to¬ 
ward her maiden dignity that romantic respect which she her¬ 
self cherished toward it. For it was incredible that any deli¬ 
cate minded girl should go through such a crisis as she had 
gone through, and then fall calmly into another lover’s arms a 
few weeks later, as though nothing had happened. 

How we all attitudinize to ourselves ! The whole of life 
often seems one long dramatic performance, in which one half 
of us is forever posing to the other half. 

But had he really made love to her ?—had he meant what she 
had assumed him to mean ? The girl lost herself in a torment 
of memory and conjecture, and meanwhile Mr. Flaxman sat 
opposite, talking away, and looking certainly as little love-sick 
as any man can well look. As the lamp flashed into the car¬ 
riage her attention was often caught by his profile and finely 
balanced head, by the hand lying on his knees, or the little ges¬ 
tures, full of life and freedom, with which he met some raid of 
Lady Charlotte’s on his opinions, or opened a corresponding 
one on hers. There was certainly power in the man, a 
bright, human sort of power, which inevitably attracted 
her. And that he was good too she had special grounds for 
knowing. 

But what an aristocrat he was after all ! What an overpros- 
perous, exclusive set he belonged to ! She lashed herself into 
anger as the other two chatted and sparred, with all these 
names of wealthy cousins and relations, with ther parks and 
their pedigrees and their pictures ! The aunt and nephew were 
debating how they could best bleed the family, in its various 
branches, of the art treasures belonging to it for the benefit of 
the East-Enders; therefore the names were inevitable. But 
Rose curled her delicate lip over them. And was it the best 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


531 


breeding, slie wondered to leave a third person so ostentatious¬ 
ly outside the conversation ? 

“ Miss Leyburn, why are you coughing ? ” said Lady Char¬ 
lotte suddenly. 

‘‘ There is a great draught,” said Rose, shivering a little. 

“So there is ! ” cried Lady Charlotte. “ Why, we have got 
both the windows open. Hugh, draw up Miss Leyburn’s.”" 

He moved over to her and drew it up. 

“I thought you liked a tornado,” he said to her, smiling. 
“ Will you have a shawl ?—there is one behind me.” 

^ “ No, thank you,” she replied, rather stiffly, and he was 
silent—retaining his place opposite to her, however. 

“ Have we reached Mr. Elsmere’s part of the world yet ? ” 
asked Lady Charlotte, looking out. 

“ Yes, we are not far off—the river is to our right. We shall 
pass St. Wilfrid’s soon.” 

The coachman turned into a street where an open-air market 
was going on. The roadway and pavements were swarming; 
the carriage could barely pick its way through the masses of 
human beings. Flaming gas-jets threw it all into strong satanic 
light and shade. At the corner of a dingy alley Rose could see 
a light going on: the begrimed, ragged children, regardless of 
the April rain, swooped backward and forward under the very 
hoofs of the horses, or flattened their noses against the win¬ 
dows whenever the horses were forced into a Avalk. 

The young girl figure in gray, with the gray feathered hat, 
seemed specially to excite their notice. The glare of the street 
brought out the lines of the face, the gold of the hair. The 
Arabs outside made loutishly flattering remarks once or twice, 
and Rose, coloring, drew back as far as she could into the car¬ 
riage. Mr. Flaxman seemed not to hear; his aunt, with that 
obtrusive thirst for information which is so fashionable now 
among all women of position, was cross-questioning him as to 
the trades and population of the district, and he was dryly re¬ 
sponding. In reality his mind was full of a whirl of feeling, 
of a wild longing to break down a futile barrier and trample on 
a baffling resistance, to take that beautiful tameless creature in 
strong, coercing arms, scold her, crush her, love her ! Why 
does she make happiness so difflcult ? What right has she to 
hold devotion so cheap ? He too grows angiy. “ She was not 
in love with that spectral creature,” the inner self declares with 
energy—“ I will vow she never was. But she is like all the 
rest—a slave to the merest forms and trappings of sentiment. 
Because he ought to have loved her, and didn’t, my love is to 
be an offense to her ! Monstrous—unjust ! ” 


532 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Suddenly they sped past St. Wilfrid’s, resplendent with 
lights, the jeweled windows of the choir rising above tlie 
squalid walls and roofs into the rainy darkness, as the mystical 
cliapel of the Graal, with its “ torclies gliininering fair,” 
Hashed out of the mountain storm and solitude on to Gala- 
had’s seeking eyes. 

Rose bent forward involuntarily. “ What angel singing ! ” 
slie said, dropping the window again to listen to the retreating 
sounds, her artist’s eye kindling. “ Did you hear it ? It was 
the last chorus in the St. Matthew Passion music.” 

“ I did not distinguish it,” he said—“ but their music is 
famous.” 

His tone was distant; there was no friendliness in it. It 
would have been pleasant to her if he would have taken up her 
little remark and let by-gones be by-gones. But he showed 
no readiness to do so. The subject dropped, and presently he 
moved back to his former seat, and Lady Charlotte and he 
resumed their talk. Rose could not but see that his manner 
towards her was much changed. She herself had compelled 
it, but all the same she saw him leave her with a capricious 
little pang of regret, and afterward the drive seemed to lier 
more tedious and the dismal streets more dismal than before. 

She tried to forget her companions altogether. Oh ! what 
would 'Robert have to say ? She was unhappy, restless. In 
her trouble lately it had often pleased her to go quite alone 
to strange churches, where for a moment the burden of the 
self had seemed lightened. But the old things were not 
always congenial to her, and there were modern ferments at 
work in her. No one of her family, unless it were Agnes, sus¬ 
pected what was going on. But in truth the rich, crude nature 
had been touched at last, as Robert’s had been long ago in Mr. 
Grey’s lecture-room, by the piercing under-voices of things— 
the moral message of the world. ‘‘ What will he have to 
say?” she asked herself again feverishly, and as she looked 
across to Mr. Flaxman she felt a childish wish to be friends 
again with him, with everybody. Life was too difficult as it was, 
without quarrels and misunderstandings to make it worse. 

CHAPTER XL. 

A LONG street of warehouses—and at the end of it the 
liorses slackened. 

“ I saw the president of the club yesterday,” said Flaxman, 
looking out. “ He is an old friend of mine—a most intelligent 
fanatic—met him on a Mansion House Fund Committee last 
winter. He promised we should be looked after. But we 


nOBFAlT ELSMEBE. 


533 


shall only get back seats, and you’ll have to put up with the 
smoking. They don’t want ladies, and we shall only be there 
on sufferance.” 

The carriage stopped. Mr. Flaxman guided his charges 
with some difficulty through the crowd abcrut the steps, who 
inspected them and their vehicle with a frank and not over¬ 
friendly curiosity. At the door they found a man who had 
been sent to look for them, and were immediately taken poses- 
sion of. He ushered them into the back of a large bare hall, 
glaringly lighted, lined with white brick, and hung at intervals 
with political portraits and a few cheap engravings of famous 
men, Jesus of Nazareth taking his turn with Buddha, Socrates, 
Moses, Shakespeare, and Paul of Tarsus. 

“ Can’t put 5^011 any forrarder, I’m afraid,” said their guide, 
with a shrug of the shoulders. “ The committee don’t like 
strangers Coming, and Mr. Collett, he got hauled over the 
coals for letting you in this evening.” 

It was a new position for Lady Charlotte to be anywhere 
on sufferance. However, in the presence of three hundred 
smoking men, who might all of them be political assassins in 
disguise, for anything she knew, she accepted her fate with 
meekness ; and she and Rose settled themselves into their 
back seat under a rough sort of gallery, glad of their veils, 
and nearly blinded with smoke. 

The hall was nearly full, and Mr. Flaxman looked curiously 
round upon its occupants. Tlie majority of them w^ere clearly 
artisans—spare, stooping, sharp-featured race. Here and 
there were a knot of stalwart dock-laborers, strongly marked 
out in physique from the watch-makers and the potters, or an 
occasional seaman out of work, ship-steward, boatswain, or 
what not, generally bronzed, quick-eyed, and comely, save 
where the film of excess had already deadened color and ex¬ 
pression. Almost every one had a pot of beer before him, stand¬ 
ing on long wooden flaps attached to the benches. The room 
was full of noise, coming apparently from the further end, 
wdiere some political bravo seemed to be provoking his neigh¬ 
bors. In their own vicinity the men scattered about were for 
the most part tugging silently at their pipes, alternately eye¬ 
ing the clock and the new-comers. 

There was a stir of feet round the door. 

“ There he is,” said Mr. Flaxman, craning round to see, and 
Robert entered. 

He started as he saw them, flashed a smile to Rose, shook 
his head at Mr. Flaxman, and passed up the room. 

‘‘ He looks pale and nervous,” said Lady Charlotte grimly. 


534 


nOBKllT ELSMBRE. 


pouncing at once on the unpromising side of things. “ If lie 
breaks down, are you prepared, Hugh, to play Elisha ? ” 

Flaxman was far too much interested in the beginnings of 
the performance to answer. 

Robert was standing forward on the platform, the chairman 
of the meeting at his side, members of the committee sitting 
behind on either hand. A good many men put down their 
pipes, and the hubbub of talk ceased. Others smoked on 
stolidl}^ 

The chairman introduced the lecturer. The subject of the 
address would be, as they already knew, “The Claim of Jesus 
upon Modern Life.” It was not very likely, he imagined, 
that Mr. Elsmere’s opinions would square with those dominant 
in the club ; but whether or no, he claimed for him, as for 
everybody, a patient hearing, and the Englishman’s privilege 
of fair pla}^ 

The speaker, a cabinet-maker dressed in a decent brown suit, 
spoke with fluency, and at the same time with that accent of 
moderation and savoir faire which some Englishmen in all 
classes have obviously inherited from centuries of government 
by discussion. Lady Charlotte, whose Liberalism was the mere 
varnish of an essentially aristocratic temper, was conscious of a 
certain dismay at the culture of the democracy as the man sat 
down. Mr. Flaxman, glancing to the right, saw a group of 
men standing, and among them a slight, sharp-featured thread- 
paper of a man, Avith a taller companion, whom he identified as 
the pair he had noticed on the night of the story-telling. The 
little gaS-fitter Avas clearly all nervous fidget and expectation ; 
the other, large and gaunt in figure, with a square, impassive 
face, and close-shut lips that had a perpetual mocking twist 
in the corners, stood beside him like some clumsy modern 
version, in a commoner clay, of Goethe’s “ spirit that denies.” 

Robert came forvA^ard with a roll of papers in his hand. 

His first AAmi-ds Avere hardly audible. Rose felt her color 
rising, Lad}^- Charlotte glanced at her nephew, the standing 
group of men cried “ Speak up ! ” The voice in the distance 
rose at once, braced by the touch of difficulty, and AAdiat it 
said came firmly down to them. 

In after-days Flaxman could not often be got to talk of the 
experience of this evening. When he did he Avould generally 
say, briefljq that as an intellectual he had never been in- 
dined to rank this first public utterance very high among 
Elsmere’s performances. The speaker’s oaaui emotion had 
stood somewhat in his way. A man argues better, perhaps, 
when he feels less, 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


535 


‘‘ I have often heard him put his case, as I thought, more 
cogently in conversation,” Flaxmaii would say—though only 
to his most intimate friends—“ but what I never saw before 
or since was such an effect of personality as he produced that 
night. From that moment, at any rate, !• loved him, and I 
understood his secret! ” 

Elsmere began with a few words of courteous thanks to the 
club for the hearing they had promised him. 

Then he passed on to the occasion of his address—the vogue 
in the district of ‘‘ certain newspapers which, I understand, 
are specially relished and patronized by your association.” 

And he laid down on a table beside him the copies of the 
Freethinker and of Faith and Fools which he had brought 
with him, and faced his audience again, his hands on his sides. 

“ Well ! I am not here to-night to attack those newspapers. 
I want to reach your sympathies if I can in another way, If 
there is anybody here who takes interest in them, who thinks 
that such writings and such witticisms as he gets purveyed to 
him in these sheets do really help the cause of truth and intel¬ 
lectual freedom, I shall not attack his position from the front. 
I shall try to undermine it. I shall aim at rousing in him such 
a state of feeling as may suddenly convince him that what is 
injured by writing of this sort is not the orthodox Christian, or 
the Church, or Jesus of Nazareth, but, always and inevitably, 
the man who writes it and the man who loves it! Ilis mind is 
possessed of an inflaming and hateful image, which drives him 
to mockery and violence. I want to replace it, if I can, by 
one of calm, of beauty and tenderness which may drive him to 
humility and sympathy. And this, indeed, is the oidy way in 
which opinion is ever really altered—by the substitution of 
one mental picture for another.” 

“ But in the first place,” resumed the speaker, after a mo¬ 
ment’s pause, changing his note a little, ‘‘ a word about my¬ 
self. I am not here to-night quite in the position of the casual 
stranger, coming down to your district for the first time. As 
some of you know, I am endeavoring to make what is practi¬ 
cally asettlement among you, asking you workingmen to teach 
me, if you will, what j^ou have to teach as to the wants and 
prospects of your order, and offering you in return whatever 
there is in me which may be worth your taking. Well, I im¬ 
agine I should look at a man who preferred a claim of that sort 
Avith some closeness ! You may well ask me for ‘antecedents,’ 
and I should like, if I may, to give them to you very shortly. 

“Well, then, though I came down to this place under the 
Aving of Mr. Edwardes ” (some cheering), “ Avho is so. greatly 


536 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


liked and respected here, I am not a Unitarian, nor am I an 
English Churchman. A year ago I was tlie vicar of an English 
country parish, wherg I should have been proud, so far as per¬ 
sonal happiness went, to s^Jend my life. Last autumn I left it 
and resigned my Orders because I could no longer accept the 
creed of the English Church.” Unconsciously the thin, digni¬ 
fied figure drew itself up, the voice took a certain diyness. 
All this was distasteful, but the orator’s instinct was im¬ 
perious. 

As he spoke about a score of pipes which had till now been 
active in Flaxman’s neighborhood went down. The silence in 
the room became suddenly of a perceptibly different cpiality. 

“ Since then I have joined no other religious association. 
But it is not—God forbid !—because there is nothing leftme t(> 
believe, but because in this transition England it is well for ^ 
man who has broken with the old things to be very patient. 
No good can come of forcing opinion or agreement prematurely. 
A generation, na}'', more, ma}' have to spend itself in mere wait' 
ing and preparing for those new leaders and those new form^ 
of corporate action which any great revolution of opinion, 
such as that we are now living through, has always produced 
in the past, and will, we are justified in believing, produce 
again. But the hour and the men will come, and ‘ they also 
serve who only stand and wait ! ’ ” 

Voice and look had kindled into fire. The consciousness of 
his audience was passing from him—the world of ideas was 
growing clearer. 

“ So much, then, for personalities of one sort. There are 
some of another, however, which I must touch upon for a mo¬ 
ment. I am to speak to you to-night of the Jesus of history, 
but not only as an historian. History is good, but religion is 
better! and if Jesus of Nazareth concerned me, and, in my 
belief, concerned you, only as a historical figure, I should not 
be here to-night. 

“ But I am to talk religion to you, and as I have begun by tell- 
ing you I am not this and I am not that, it seems to me that 
for mere clearness’ sake, for the sake of that round and whole 
image of thought which I want to present to jmu, you must 
let me run through a preliminary confession of faith—as 
shiort and simple as I can make it. You must let me describe 
certain views of the universe and of man’s place in it, which 
make the framework, as it were, into which I shall ask you to 
fit the picture of Jesus which will come after.” 

Robert stood a moment considering. An instant’s nervous¬ 
ness, a inoiiuentary sign of self-consciousness, would have 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 537 

broken the spell and set the room against him. lie showed 
neither. 

“ My friends,” he said at last, speaking to the crowded 
benches of London workmen with the same simplicity he would 
have nsed toward his boys at Mnrewell, “the man who is ad¬ 
dressing you to-night believes in God; and in Conscience, which 
is God’s witness in the soul; and in Experience, which is at once 
the record and the instrument of man’s education at God’s 
hands. He places his Avhole trust, for life and death, ‘ in God 
the Father Almighty —’ in that force at the root of things 
which is revealed to us whenever a man helps his neighbor, or 
a mother denies herself for her child ; whenever a soldier dies 
without a murmur for his country, or a sailor puts out in the 
darkness to rescue the perishing; whenever a workman throws 
mind and conscience into his work, or a statesman labors not 
for his own gain but for that of the state ! He believes in an 
Eternal Goodness—and an Eternal Mind—of which Nature 
and Man are the continuous and the only revelation—” 

The room grew absolutel}^ still. And into the silence there 
fell, one by one, the short, terse sentences, in which the seer, 
the believer, struggled to express what God has been, is, and 
will ever be to the soul which trusts him. In them the whole 
effort of the speaker was really to restrain, to moderate, to de¬ 
personalize the voice of faith. But the intensity of each word 
burned it into the hearer as it was spoken. Even Lady Char¬ 
lotte turned a little pale—the tears stood in her eyes. 

Then, from the witness of God in the soul, and in the history 
of man’s moral life, Elsmere turned to the glorification of Ex¬ 
perience, “ of that unvarying and rational order of the world 
which has been the appointed instrument of man’s training 
since life and thought began.” 

“ There,^’’ he said slowly, “ in the unbroken sequences of 
nature, in the physical history of the world, in the long history 
of man, physical, intellectual, moral— there lies the revelation 
of God. There is no other, my friends ! ” 

Then, while the room hung on his words, he entered on a 
brief exposition of the text, “ Miracles do not happen^'‘ restat¬ 
ing Hume’s old argument, and adding to it some of the most 
cogent of those modern arguments drawn from literature, from 
history, from the comparative study of religions and religious 
evidence, which were not practically at Hume’s disposal, but 
which are now affecting the popular mind as Hume’s reason¬ 
ing could never have affected it. 

“ We are now able to show how miracle, or the belief in it, 
which is the same thing, comes into being. The study of mir- 


538 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


acle in all nations, and under all conditions, yields everywhere 
the same results. Miracle may be the child of imagination, of 
love, nay, of a passionate sincerity, but invariably it lives with 
ignorance and is withered by knowledge ! ” 

And then, with lightning unexpectedness, he turned upon 
his audience, as though the ardent soul reacted at once against 
a strain of mere negation. 

“ But do not lot yourselves imagine for an instant that, be¬ 
cause in a rational view of history there is no place for a Resur¬ 
rection and Ascension, therefore you ma}^ profitably allow 
yourself a mean and miserable mirth of this sort over the 
past ! ” and his outstretched hand struck the newspapers beside 
him with passion. Do not imagine for an instant that what 
is binding, adorable, beautiful in that past is done away with 
when miracle is given up. No, thank God. We still ‘live by 
admiration, hope and love.’ God only draws closer, great 
men become greater, human life more wonderful as miracle 
disappears. Woe to you if you can not see it !—it is the test¬ 
ing truth of our day. 

“ And besides—do jmu suppose that mere violence, mere in¬ 
vective and savage mockery ever accomplished anything—nay, 
Avhat is more to the point, ever destroyed anything in human 
history? No—an idea can not be killed from Avitliout—it can 
only be supplanted, transformed, b}^ another idea, and that one 
of equal virtue and magic. Strange paradox ! In the moral 
world you can not pull down except by gentleness—you can 
not revolutionize except by S3unpath3''. Jesus only sujxn-seded 
Judaisiii b3^ absorbing and recreating all that was best in it. 
There are no inexplicable gaps and breaks in the story of 
humanit3^ Tlie religion of to-da3q with all its faults and mis¬ 
takes, will go on unshaken so long as there is nothing else of 
equal loveliness and potenc3" to put in its place. The Jesus of 
the churches will remain paramount so long as the man of to- 
da3^ imagines himself dispensed by an3^ increase of knowledge 
from loving the Jesus of histoiy. 

“But xohy ? yow will ask me. What does the Jesus of his¬ 
tory matter to me ? ” 

And so he was brought to the place of great men in the de¬ 
velopment of mankind—to the part played in the human story 
by those lives in which men have seen all their noblest thoughts 
of God, of duty, and of law embodied, realized before them 
with a shining and incomparable beaut3^ 

“ . . . You think—because it is becoming plain to the mod¬ 
ern eye that the ignorant love of his first followers wreatlied 
his life in legend, that therefore you can escape from Jesus of 


nOBEHT ELSMERE. 


539 


Nazareth, yon can put liini aside as though he had never been ? 
Folly ! Do what 3^011 will, you can not escape him. His life and 
death underlie our institutions as the alphabet underlies our 
literature. Just as the lives of Buddha and of Mohammed are 
wrought inetfaceably into the civilization of Africa and Asia, 
so the life of Jesus is wrought inetfaceably into the higher 
civilization, the nobler social conceptions of Europe. It is 
wrought into your being and into mine. We are what we are 
to-night, as Englishmen and as citizens, largely because a 
Galilean peasant was born and grew to manhood, and preached, 
and loved, and died. And you think that a fact so tremen¬ 
dous can be just scoffed away—that we can get rid of it, and 
of our share in it, by a ribald paragraph and a caricature ! 

“ No ! Your hatred and your ridicule are powerless. And 
thank God they are powerless. There is no wanton waste in 
the moral world, any more than in the material. There is 
only fruitful change and beneficent transformation. Granted 
that the true stoiy of Jesus of Nazareth was from the begin¬ 
ning obscured b}^ error and mistake ; granted that those errors 
and mistakes which were once the strength of Christianity are 
now its weakness, and by the slow march and sentence of time 
are now threatening, unless we can clear them away, to lessen 
the hold of Jesus on the love and remembrance of man. AYhat 
then ? The* fact is merel}^ a call to 3^011 and me, who recognize 
it, to go back to the roots of thing, to rcconceive the Christ, 
to bring him afresh into our lives, to make the life so freel3^ 
given for man minister again in new ways to man’s new needs. 
Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great ideas, 
capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation. 
And woe to our human weakness if it loose its hold one instant 
before it must on any of those rare and precious possessions 
which have helped it in the past, and may again inspire it in 
the future ! 

“ To reconceive the Christ! It is the special task of our age, 
though in some sort and degree it has been the ever-recurring 
task of Europe since the beginning.” 

He paused, and then very simply, and so as to be understood 
by those who heard him, he gave a rapid sketch of that great 
operation worked by the best intellect of Europe during the 
last half-century—broadly speaking—on the facts and docu¬ 
ments of primitive Christianity, From all sides and by the 
help of eveiy conceivable instrument those facts have been in¬ 
vestigated, and now at last the great result—“ the re-vivified, 
re-conceived truth ”—seems ready to emerge ! Much ma3" still 
be known—much can never be known, but if we will, we may 


540 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


now discern tlie true features of Jesus of Nazareth, as no gen* 
eration but our own has been able to discern them since those 
who had seen and handled passed away. 

“ Let me try, however feebly, and draw it afresh for you, 
that life of lives, that story of stories, as the labor of bur own 
age in particular has patiently revealed it to us. Come back 
with me through the centuries ; let us try and see the Christ of 
Galilee and the Christ of Jerusalem as he was, before a credu¬ 
lous love and Jewish tradition and Greek subtlety had at once 
dimmed and glorified the truth. Ah ! do what we will, it is so 
Bcant}^ and poor, this knowledge of ours, compared with all 
that we yearn to know—but, such as it is, let me, very humbly 
and very tentatively, endeavor to put it before you.” 

At this point Flaxman’s attention was suddenly distracted 
by a stir round the door of entrance on his left hand. Looking 
round, he saw a Ritualist priest, in cassock and cloak, disput¬ 
ing in hurried undertones with the men about the door. At 
last he gained his j^oint apparently, for the men, with half- 
angry, half-quizzing looks at each other, allowed him to come 
in, and he found a seat. Flaxnian was greatly struck by the 
face—by its ascetic beauty, the stern and yet delicate whiteness 
and emaciation of it. He sat with both hands resting on the 
stick he held in front of him, intently listening, the perspira¬ 
tion of physical weakness on his brow, and round his finely 
curved mouth. Clearly he could hardly see the lecturer, for 
the room had become inconveniently crowded, and the men 
about him were mostly standing. 

“One of the St. Wilfrid’s priests, I suppose,” Flaxman said 
too himself. “ What on earth is he doing dmis cette gaUre .? 
Are we to have a disputation ? That would be dramatic.” 

He had no attention, however, to spare, and the intruder 
was promptly forgotten. When he turned back to the plat¬ 
form he found that Robert, with Mackaj^’s help, had hung on 
a screen to his right four or five large drawings of Nazareth, 
of the Lake of Gennesaret, of Jerusalem, and the Temple of 
Ilerod, of the ruins of that synagogue on the probable site of 
Capernaum in which conceivably Jesus may have stood. They 
were bold and striking, and filled the bare hall at once with 
suggestions of the East. He had used them often at Mure- 
well. Then adopting a somewhat different tone, he plunged 
into the life of Jesus. He brought to it all his trained historical 
power, all his story-telling faculty, all his sympathy with the 
needs of feeling. And bit by bit, as the quick, nervous sen¬ 
tences issued and struck, each like the touch of a chisel, the 
majestic figure emerged, set against its natural background, 



UOBEUT ELSMERE. 


541 


instinct with some fraction at least of the magic of reality, 
most human, most persuasive, most tragic. He brought out 
tlie great words of the new faith, to which, whatever may be 
their literal origin, Jesus, and Jesus only, gave currency and 
immortal force. He dwelt on the magic, the permanence, the 
expansiveness, of the young Nazarene’s central conception— 
the spiritualized, universalized “ Kingdom of God.” Els- 
mere’s thought, indeed, knew nothing of a perfect man, as it 
knew nothing of an incarnate God ; he shrank from nothing 
that he believed true ; but every limitation, every reserve he 
allowed himself did but make the whole more poignantly real, 
and the claim of Jesus more penetrating. 

“ The world had grown since Jesus preaclied in Galilee and 
Judgea. We can not learn the of God’s lesson from him 

now—nay, we could not then ! But all that is most essential 
to man—all that saves the soul, all that purifies the heart— 
that he has still for you and me, as he had it for the men and 
women of his own time.” 

Tlien he came to the last scenes. His voice sank a little ; 
Ills notes dropped from his hand ; and the silence grew oppress¬ 
ive. The dramatic force, the tender, passionate insight, the 
fearless modernness with which the story was told, made it 
almost unbearable. Those listening saw the trial, the streets 
of Jerusalem, the desolate place outside the northern gate ; 
they were spectators of the torture, they heard the last cry. 
No one present had ever so seen, so heard before. ^Jlose had 
hidden her face. Flaxman for the first time forgot to watch 
the audience ; the men had forgotten each other ; and for the 
first time that night, in many a cold, imbittered heart there 
was born that love of the Son of Man which Nathaniel felt, 
and John, and Mary of Bethany, and which had in it now, as 
then, the promise of the future. 

“ ‘ He laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of a rock, 
and he rolled a stone against the door of the tomb.'* Tlie 
ashes of Jesus of Nazareth mingled with the earth of Pal¬ 
estine : 


“ ‘ Far hence he lies 

In the lorn Syrian town, 

And on his grave with shining eyes, 

The Syrian stars look down.’ ” 

lie stopped. The melancholy cadence of the verse died away. 
Then a gleam broke over the pale, exhausted face—a gleam of 
extraordinary sweetness. 

“ And in the days and weeks that followed the devout and 


542 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


passionate fancy of a few mourning Galileans begat the 
exciuisite fable of the Resiirrection. How natural—ami amid 
all its falseness—how true, is that naive and contradictory 
story ! The rapidity with which it spread is a measure of 
many things. It is, above all, a measure of the greatness of 
Jesus, of the force with which he had drawn to himself the 
hearts and imaginations of men. . . . 

“ And now, my friends, what of all this ? If these things I 
have been sa^dng to you are true, what is the upshot of them 
for you and me ? Simply this, as I conceive it—that instead of 
wasting your time, and degrading your souls, by indulgence in 
such grime as this ”—and he pointed to the newspapers—“ it 
is your urgent business and mine—at this moment—to do our 
very utmost to bring this life of Jesus, our precious invaluable 
possession as a people, back into some real and cogent relation 
with our modern lives and beliefs and hopes. Do not answer 
me that such an etfort is a mere dream and futility, conceived 
in the vague, apart from reality—that men must have some¬ 
thing to wo4-ship, and that if they can not worship Jesus they 
will not trouble to love him. Is the world desolate with God 
still in it, and does it rest merely with us to love or not to 
love ? Love and revere something we must, if we are to be 
men and not beasts. At all times and in all nations, as I have 
tried to show you, man has helped himself by the constant and 
passionate memory of those great ones of his race who have 
spoken to him most audibly of God and of eternal hope. And 
for us Europeans and Englishmen, as I have also tried to show 
you, hikory and inheritance have decided. If we turn away 
from the true Jesus of Nazareth because he has been disfigured 
and misrepresented by the churches, we turn away from that 
in which our weak wills and desponding souls are meant to 
find their most obvious and natural help and inspiration—from 
that symbol of the Divine which, of necessity, means most to 
us. No ! give him back your hearts—be ashamed that you 
have ever forgotten your debt to him ! Let combination and 
brotherhood do for the newer and simpler faith what they did 
once for the old—let them give it a practical shape, a practi¬ 
cal grip on human life. . . . Then we too shall have our 
Easter !—we too shall have the right to say, he is not here^ 
he is risen. Not here—in legend, in miracle, in the beautiful 
outworn forms and crystallizations of older thought. He is 
risen —in a wiser reverence and a more reasonable love ; risen 
in new forms of social help inspired by his memory, called 
afresh by his name ! Risen—if you and your children will 
it—ill a church or company of the faithful, over the gates of 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


543 


whieli two sayings of man’s past, into which man’s present 
has breathed new meanings, shall be written : 


and 


“ ‘ In Thee, O Eternal, have I put my tiHist 
“ ‘ This do in remembrance of Me.’ ” 


Tlie rest was soon over. The audience woke from the trance 
in which it had been held, with a sudden burst of talk and ' 
movement. In the midst of it, and as the majority of the 
audience were filling out into the adjoining room, the gas-fitter’s 
tall companion, Andrews, mounted the platform, while the gas- 
fitter himself, with an impatient shrug, pushed his way into 
tlie outgoing crowd. Andrews went slowly and deliberately to 
work, dealing out his long, cantankerous sentences with a 
nasal sang froid which seemed to change in a moment the 
whole aspect and temperature of things. He remarked that 
Mr. Elsmere had talked of what great scholars had done to 
clear up this matter of Christ and Christianity. Well, he was 
free to maintain that old Tom Paine was as good a scholar as 
any of ’em, and most of them in that hall knew what he 
thought about it, Tom Paine hadn’t anything to say against 
Jesus Christ, and he hadn’t. He was a workman and a fine 
sort of man, and if he’d been alive now he’d have been a So¬ 
cialist, “ as most of us are,” and he’d have made it hot for the 
rich loafers, and the sweaters, and the middlemen, “ as we’d 
like to make it hot for ’em.” But as for those people who got 
up the Church—MjThologists Tom Paine called ’em—and the 
miracles, and made an uncommonly good thing out of it, 
pecuniarily speaking, he didn’t see what they’d got to do with 
keeping up, or mending, or preserving their precious bit of 
work. The world had found ’em out, and serve ’em right. 

And he wound up with a fierce denunciation of priests, not 
without a harsli savor and. eloquence, which was much clapped' 
bv the small knot of workmen among whom he had been 
standing. I 

Tlien there followed a Socialist—an eager, ugly, black- 
bearded little fellow, who preached the absolute necessity of 
doing without “ any cultus whatsoever,” threw scorn on both 
the Christians and the Positivists for refusing so to deny them¬ 
selves, and aj)pealed earnestly to his group of hearers “to help 
in bringing religion back from heaven to earth, where it be¬ 
longs.” Mr. Elsrnere’s new church, if he ever got it, would 
only be a fresh instrument in the hands of the honrgeoisie. 
And when tlie people had got their rights and brought down 
the capitalists, they were not going to be such fools as to put 


544 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


tlieir necks under tlie heel of what were called “ the educated 
classes.” The people who wrote the newspapers Mr. Elsinere 
objected to, knew quite enough for the working-man—and 
people should not be too smooth-spoken ; what the working 
class wanted beyond everything just now was grit. 

A few other sliort speeches followed, mostly of the common 
Secularist type, in defense of the newspapers attacked. But 
the defense, on the whole, was sliuffling and curiously half¬ 
hearted. Robert, sitting by with his head on his hand, felt 
that there, at any rate, his onslaught had told. 

He said a few words in reply, in a low husky voice, without 
a trace of his former passion, and the meeting broke up. The 
room had quickly tilled when it was known that he was up 
again ; and as he descended the steps of the platform, after 
shakimg hands with the chairman, the hundreds present broke 
into a sudden burst of cheering. Lady Charlotte pressed for¬ 
ward to him through the crowd, offering to take him home. 
“ Come with us, Mr. Elsmere ; you look like a ghost.” But 
he shook his head, smiling. “ No, thank you. Lady Charlotte 
—I must have some air,” and he took her out on his arm, 
while Flaxman followed with Rose. 

It once occurred to Flaxman to look round for the priest he 
had seen come in. But there were no signs, of him. “Iliad 
an idea he would have spoken,” he thought. “ Just as well, 
perhaps. We should have had a row.” 

Lady Charlotte threw herself back in the carriage as they 
drove, off, with a long breath, and the inward reflection, “ So 
his wife wouldn’t come and hear him ! Must be a woman with 
a character that—a Strafford in petticoats ! ” 

Robert turned up the street to the city, the tall, slight figure 
seeming to shrink together as he walked. After his passionate 
effort indescribable depression had overtaken him. 

“ Words—words ! ” he said to himself, striking out his hands 
in a kind of feverish protest, as he strode along, against his 
own powerlessness, against that weight of the present and the 
actual which seems to the enthusiast alternately light as air, 
or heavy as the mass of Etna on the breast of Enceladus. 

Suddenly, at the corner of a street, a man’s figure in a long 
black robe stojiped him and laid a hand on his arm. 

“ Newcome ! ” cried Robert, standing still. 

“ I was there,” said the other, bending forward and looking 
close into his ej^es. I heard almost all. I went to confront, 
to denounce you ! ” 

By the light of a lamp not far off Robert caught the atten- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


545 


nated whiteness and sharpness of the well-known face, to 
which weeks of fasting and mystical excitement had given a 
kind of unearthly remoteness. He gathei-ed himself together 
with an inward groan. He felt as though there were no force 
in him at that moment wherewith to meet reproaches, to beat 
down fanaticism. The pressure on nerve and strength seemed 
unbearable. 

Newcome, watching him with eagle eye, saw the sudden 
shrinking and hesitation. He had often in old days felt the 
same sense of power over the man who yet, in what seemed 
his weakness, had always escaped him in the end. 

“ I went to denounce,” he continued, in a strange, tense 
voice, “and the Lord refused it to me. He kept me watching 
for you here. These words are not mine I speak. I waited 
patiently in that room till the Lord should deliver his enemy 
into my hand. My wrath was hot against the deserter that 
could not even desert in silence—hot against his dupes. Then 
suddenly words came to me—they have come to me before, 
they burn up the very heart and marrow in me—‘ W^ho is he 
that saith, and it cometh to pass, and the Lord comiitandeth it 
not? There they were in my ears, written on the walls—the 
air—” 

The hand dropped from Robert’s arm. A dull look of de¬ 
feat, of regret, darkened the gleaming eyes. TheyAvere stand¬ 
ing in a quiet, deserted street, but through a side opening the 
lights, the noise, the turbulence of the open-air market came 
drifting to them through the raining atmosphere which blurred 
and magnilied everything. 

“ Ay, after days and nights in his most blessed sanctuary,” 
Hewcome resumed slowly, “ I came by his commission, as I 
thought, to fight his battle with a traitor ! And at the last 
moment his strength, which was in me, Avent from me. I sat 
there dumb ; his hand Avas heavy upon me. His will be done ! ” 

The voice sank ; the priest dreAv his thin, shaking hand 
across his e^^es, as though the aAve of a mysterious struggle 
were still upon him. Tlien he turned again to Elsmere, his 
face softening, radiating. 

“Elsmere, take the sign, the message ! I thought it Avas 
given to me to declare the Lord’s Avrath. Instead, he sends 
you once more by me, even now—even fresh from this neAv 
defiance of his mercy, the tender offer of his grace ! He lies 
at rest to-night, my brother”—Avhat SAveetness in the low 
vibrating tones !—“ after all the anguish. Let me draAv you 
down on your knees beside him. It is you, a-ou, Avdio have 
helped to drive in the nails, to embitter the agony ! It is 


540 


ROBERT ELSMERE, 


you who in his loneliness have been robbing him of the souls 
that should be his ! It is you who have been doing your ut¬ 
most to make his Cross and Passion of no eftect. Oh, let it 
break your heart to think of it ! Watch by him to-night, iny 
friend, my brother, and to-morrow let the risen Lord reclaim 
his own ! ” 

Never had Robert seen any mortal face so persuasively 
beautiful ; never surely did saint or ascetic plead with a 
more penetrating gentleness. After the storm of those 
opening words tlie change was magical. The tears stood in 
Elsmere’s eyes. But his quick insight, in spite of himself, 
divined the subtle natural facts behind the outburst, the 
strained physical state, the irritable brain—all the conse¬ 
quences of a long defiance of pln^sical and mental law. The 
priest repelled him, the man drew him like a magnet. 

“ What can I sa}^ to you, Newcome ? ” he cried despairingly, 
“ Let me say nothing, dear old friend ! I am tired out ; so, I 
expect, are you. I know what this week has been to you. 
Walk with me a little. Leave these great things alone. We 
can not^igree. Be content—God knows ! Tell me about the 
old place and the people. I long for news of them.” 

A sort of shudder passed through his com})ation. Newcome 
stood wrestling with himself. It was like the slow departure 
of a possessing force. Then he somberly assented, and they 
turned toward the city. But his answers, as Robert questioned 
him, were sharp and mechanical, and presently it became evi¬ 
dent that the demands of the ordinary talk to which Elsmere 
rigorously held him were more than he could bear. 

As the}^ reached St. Paul’s, towering into the watery moon¬ 
light of the cloudy skyq he stopped abruptly and said good¬ 
night. 

“ You came to me in the spirit of war,” said Robert, with 
some emotion, as he held his hand ; give me instead the 
grasp of peace ! ” 

The spell of his manner, his presence, prevailed at last. A 
melancholy, quivering smile dawned on the priest’s delicate lip. 

“ God bless you—God restore vou ! ” he said, sadly, and 
was gone. 

CHAPTER XLI. 

A WEEK later Elsmere was startled to find himself detained, 
after his story-telling, by a trio of workmen, asking, on behalf 

of some thirty and forty members of the Nortli R-Club, that 

he would give them a course of lectures on the New Testament. 
One of them was the gas-fitter Charles Richards ; another was 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


547 


the watch-maker Lestraiige, who had originally challenged 
Robert to deliver himself; and the third was a tough old 
Scotchman of sixt}^ with a philosophical turn, under whose 
spoutings of Hume and Locke, of Reid ancfDugald Stewart, 
delivered in the shrillest of cracked voices, the club had writhed 
many an impatient half-hour on debating nights. He had an 
unexpected artistic gift, a kind of “ sport ” as compared with 
the rest of his character, which made him a valued designer 
in the pottery works ; but his real interests were speculative 
and argumentative, concerned with “ common nawtions and the 
praimary elements of reason,” and the appearance of Robert 
in the district seemed to offer him at last a foeman worthy of 
his steel. Elsmere shrewdly suspected that the last two looked 
forward to any teaching he might give mostly as a new and 
favorable exercising ground for their own wits ; but he took 
the risk, gladly accepted the invitation, and fixed Sunday 
afternoons for a weekly New Testament lecture. 

His first lecture, which he prepared with great care, was 
delivered to thirty-seven men a fortnight later. It was on the 
political and social state of Palestine and the East at the time 
of Christ’s birth ; and Robert, who was as fervent a believer in 
“ large maps ” as Lord Salisbury, had prepared a goodly store 
of them for the occasion, togetlier with a number of drawings 
and photographs which formed a part of the collection he had 
been gradually making since his own visit to the Holy Land. 
There was nothing he laid more stress on than these helps to 
the eye and imagination in dealing with the Bible. He was 
accustomed to maintain his arguments with Hugh Flaxman 
that the orthodox traditional teaching of Christianity would 
become impossible as soon as it should be the habit to make a 
free and -modern use of history and geography and social ma¬ 
terial in connection with the Gospels. Nothing tends so much, 
he would say, to break down the irrational barrier which men 
have raised about this particular tract of historical space, 
nothing helps so much to let in the light and air of scientific 
thought u|X)n it, and therefore nothing prepares the way so 
effectively for a series of new conceptions. 

By a kind of natural selection, Richards became Elsmere’s 
chief helper and adjutant in the Sunday lectures—with regard 
to all such matters as beating up recruits, keeping guard over 
portfolios, handing round maps and photographs, etc.—sup- 
jilanting in his function the jealous and sensitive Mackay, 
who, after his original opposition, had now arrived at regard¬ 
ing Robert as his own particular property, and the lecturer’s 
quick smile of thanks for services rendered as his own especial 


548 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


right. Tlie bright, quicksilvery, irascible little workman, how¬ 
ever, was irresistible and had his way. He had taken a passion 
for Robert as for a being of another order and another world. 
In the discussions which generally followed the lecture he 
showed a receptiveness, an intelligence, whicli were in reality a 
matter not of the mind but of the heart. He loved, therefore 
he understood. At the club he stood for Elsmere with a quiv¬ 
ering, spasmodic eloquence, as against Andrews and the Secu¬ 
larists. One thing only puzzled Robert. Among all the little 
fellow’s sallies and indiscretions, which were not infrequent, no 
reference to his home life was ever included. Here he kept 
even Robert absolutely at arm’s length. Robert knew that 
he was married and had children, nothing more. 

The old Scotchman, Macdonald, came out after the first 
lecture somewhat crestfallen. 

“ Not the sort of stooff I’d expected ! ” he said, with a shake 
of perplexity on the rugged face. “ He doesn’t talk eneuf in 
the ^abstract for me.” 

But he went on again, and the second lecture, on the origin 
of the Gospels, got hold of him, especially as it supplied him 
with a whole armory of new arguments in sup])ort of Hume’s 
doctrine of conscience, and in defiance of that blatin’ creetur 
Reid.” The thesis with which Robert, drawing on some of the 
stories supplied him by the squire’s book, began his account— 
^.e., the gradual growth within the limits of history of man’s 
capacity for telling the exact truth—fitted in, to the Scotch¬ 
man’s thinking, so providentially with his own favorite ex¬ 
perimental doctrines as against the “ intueetion ” folks, “ who 
will have it that a babby’s got as moch mind as Mr. Glad¬ 
stone, ef it only knew it ! ” that afterward he never missed a 
lecture. * 

Lestrange was more difficult. He had the inherited tempera¬ 
ment of the Genevesewhich made Geneva the head¬ 
quarters of Calvinism in the sixteenth century, and bids fair 
to make her the headquarters of continental radicalism in the 
nineteenth. Robert never felt his wits so much stretched and 
sharpened as when after the lecture Lestrange was putting 
questions and objections with an acrid subtlety and persistence 
worthy of a descendant of that burgher class wliich first built 
up the Calvinistic system and then produced the destroj^er of 
it in Rousseau. Robert bore his heckling, however, with great 
patience and adroitness. He had need of all he knew, as Mur¬ 
ray Edwardes had warned him. But luckily he knew a great 
deal; his thought was clearing and settling month by month, 
and whatever he may have lost at any moment by the turn of 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


549 


an argument, he recovered immediately afterward by the force 
of personality, and of a single-mindedness in which there was 
never a trace of personal grasping. * 

AVeek by week the lecture became more absorbing to him,the 
men more pliant, his hold on them firmer, llis disinterested¬ 
ness, his brightness and resource, perha])S, too, the signs about 
him of light and frail ])hysical organization, the novelty of 
his position, the inventiveness of his method, gave him little by 
little an immense power in the place. After the fii’st two 
lectures Murray Edwardes became his constant and enthusi¬ 
astic hearer on Sunday afternoons, and, catching some of 
Robert’s ways and si)irit, he graduallj" brought his own chapel 
and teaching more and more into line with the Elgood Street 
undertaking. So that the venture of the two men began to take 
ever larger proportions; and, kindled b}^ the growing interest 
and feeling about him, dreams began to rise in Elsmere’s mind 
which as yet he hardh^ dared to cherish; which came and went, 
liowever, weaving a substance for themselves out of each suc¬ 
cessive incident and effort. 

Meanwhile he was at woi'k on an average three evenings in 
the week besides the Sunday. In AVest End drawing-rooms 
llis personal gift had begun to tell no less than in this crowded, 
squalid east; and as his aims became knoAvn, other men, finding 
the thoughts of thier own hearts revealed in him, or touched 
with that social compunction which is one of the notes of our 
time, came down and became his helpers. Of all the social 
projects of which that Elgood Street room became the center, 
Elsmere was, in some sense', the life and inspiration. But it 
was not these projects themselves which made this period of his 
life remarkable. London at the present moment, if it be honey¬ 
combed with vice and misery, is also honeycombed with the 
labor of an ever-expanding charity. AA^eek b}^ week men and 
women of like gifts and energies with Elsmere spend them¬ 
selves, as he did, in the constant effort to serve and to alleviate. 
AVhat noticeable, what was remarkable in this work of his, 
was the spirit, the religious passion which, radiating from him, 
began after a while to kindle the whole body of men about 
him. It was from his Sunday lectures and his talks with the 
children, boys and girls, who came in after the lecture to spend 
a happy hour and a half Avith him on Sunday afternoons, that 
in later years hundreds of men and Avomen will date the begin¬ 
nings of a neAAq absorbing life. There came a time, indeed, 
Avhen, instead of meeting criticism by argument, Robert Avas 
able simply to point to accomplished facts. “ You ask me,” 
he Av^ould say in effect, to prove to you that men can love, 


550 


ROBERT ELSMERK. 


can make a new and fruitful use, for dail^'- life and conduct, of 
a merely human Christ. Co among our men, talk to our chil¬ 
dren, and satisfy yourself. A little while ago scores of these 
men either hated the very name of Christianity or were entirely 
indifferent to it. To scores of them now the name of the 
teacher of Nazareth, the victim of Jerusalem,is dear and sacred; 
his life, his death, his words, are becoming once more a con¬ 
stant source of moral effort and spiritual hope. See for vour- 
self ! ” 

However, we are anticipating. Let us go back to May. 

One beautiful morning Robert Avas sitting Avorking in his 
stud}^, his window open to the breezy blue sky and the budding 
plane-trees outside, when the door AA^as thrown open^and “ Mr. 
\yendo\'er” A\^as announced. 

The squire entered; but AAdiat a shrunken and aged squire ! 
The gait AA^as feeble, the bearing had lost all its old erectness, 
the bronzed strength of the face had given place to a Avaxen 
and ominous pallor. Robert, springing up Avdth joy to meet 
the great gust of Mure well air Avhich seemed to blow about 
him with tlie mention of the squire’s name, Avas struck, ar¬ 
rested. He guided his guest to a chair Avith an almost filial 
carefulness. 

“ I don’t believe, sqiwre,” he exclaimed, “you ought to be 
doing tliis—Avandering about London by yourself ! ” 

But the squire, as silent and angular as ever Avhen anything 
personal to himself Avas concerned, Avould take no notice of 
the implied anxiety and sympathy. He grasped his umbrella 
between his knees Avith a pair of broAvn, twisted hands, and 
sitting very upriglit, looked critically round the room. Robert, 
studying the dwindled figure, remembered witli a pang the 
saying of another Oxford scholar, apropos of the death of a 
young 7nan of extraordinary promise, “ What learning has 
perished loith him ! IIoio vain seems all toil to acquire! ”—and I 
the Avords, as they passed through his mind, seemed to him to 
ring another death-knell. i 

But after the first painful impression he could not help los¬ 
ing himself in the pleasure of the familiar face, the MureAvell 
associations. 

“ How is the village, and the institute ? . And what sort of 
man is my successor—the man, I mean, Avho came after Armit- 
stead ? ” 

“ I had him once to dinner,” said the squire briefly : “ he 
made a false quantity, and asked me to subscribe to the 
Church Missionary Society. I haven’t seen him since. He and 
the village have been at loggerhead about the institute, I be- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


551 


lieve. He wanted to turn out the dissenters. Bateson came 
to me, and we circumvented him, of course.^ But the man’s 
an ass. Don’t talk of him ! ” 

Robert sighed a long sigh. Was all his work undone? It 
wrung his heart to remember the opening of the institute, the 
ardor of his boys. He asked a few questions about indi¬ 
viduals, but soon gave it up as hopeless. The squire neither 
knew nor cared. 

“ And jVlrs. Darcy ? ” 

“ My sister had tea in her thirtieth summer-house last Sun¬ 
day,” remarked the squire grimly. “ She wished me to com¬ 
municate the fact to you and Mrs. Elsmere. Also, that the 
worst novel of the country will be out in a fortnight, and she 
trusts to you to see it well reviewed in all the le*ading journals.” 

Robert laughed, but it was not very easy to laugh. There 
was a sort of ghastly undercurrent in the squire’s sarcasms 
that effectually deprived them of anything mirthful. 

“ And your book ? ” 

“ Is in abeyance. I shall bequeath you the manuseript in 
my will, to do what you like with.” 

‘‘ Squire! ” 

“ Quite true ! If 5"ou had stayed, I should have finished it, 
I suppose. But after a certain age the toil of spinning cob¬ 
webs entirely out of his own brain becomes too much for a 
man.” 

It was the first thing of the sort' that iron mouth had ever 
said to him. Elsmere was painfully touched. 

‘‘ You must not—you shall not give it up,” he urged. ‘‘ Pub¬ 
lish the first part alone, and ask me for any help you please.” 

The squire shook his head. 

“ Let it be. Your paper in the Nineteenth Century showed 
me that the best thing I can do is to hand on my materials 
to 3^011. Though I am not sure that when 3^011 have got 
them you will make the best use of them. You and Gre3^ be¬ 
tween 3'ou call yourselves Liberals, and imagine yourselves 
reformers, and all the while 3"0u are doing nothing but playing 
into the hands of the Blacks. All the theistic philosoph3^ of 
3^ours on]3" means so much grist to their mill in the end.” 

“ They don’t see it in that light themselves,” said Robert, 
smiling. 

“ No,” returned the squire, ‘‘because most men are })uzzle- 
heads. Why,” lie added, looking dark]3^ at Robert, while the 
great head fell forward on his breast in the familiar Murewell 
attitude, “ why can’t you do your work and let the preaching 
alone ? ” 


552 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


“ Because,” said Robert, “ tbe preacbirig seems to me my 
work. Tliere is the great difference between ns, squire. You 
look upon knowledge as an end in itself. It may be so. But 
to me knowledge has always been valuable first and foremost 
for its beai-ing on life.” 

“ Fatal twist that,” returned the squire harshly. “ Yes, I 
know; it was always in you. AVell, are you happy? does this 
new crusade of yours give you pleasure ? ” 

“Happiness,” replied Robert, leaning against the chimney- 
piece, and speaking in a low voice, “is always relative. No 
one knows it better than you. Life is full of oppositions. But 
tht work takes my whole heart and all m^^ energies.” 

The squire looked at him in disapproving silence fora while. 

“You will bury your life in it miserabl^q” he said at last ; 
“ it will be a toil of Sisyphus leaving no trace behind it ; 
whereas such a book as 5^11 might write, if you gave your life 
to it, might live and work; and hariy the enemy when you are 
gone.” ^ 

Robert forbore the natural retort. 

The squire went round his library, making remarks, with all 
the caustic shrewdness natural to him, on the new volumes 
that Robert had acquired since their walks and talks to¬ 
gether. 

“ The Germans,” he said at last, putting back a book into 
the shelves with a neAV accent of distaste and weariness, “ are 
beginning to founder in the sea of their own learning. Some¬ 
times I think I will read no more German. It is a nation of 
learned fools, none of whom ever sees an inch beyond his own 
professorial nose.” 

Then he stayed to luncheon, and Catherine,'moved b}^ manj^ 
feelings—perhaps in subtle striving against her own passionate 
sense of wrong at this man’s hands—was kind to him, and 
talked and smiled, indeed, so much that the squire for the first 
time in his life took individual notice of her, and as he parted 
with Elsmere in the hall made the remark that Mrs. Elsmere 
seemed to like London, to which Robert, busy in an oppor¬ 
tune search for his guest’s coat, made no reply. 

“ When are yon coming to Murewell ? ” the squire said to 
hitn abruptly, as he stood at the door muffled up as though it 
were December. “ There are a good manj^ points in that last 
article you want talking to about. Come next month with 
Mrs. Eismere.” 

Robert drew a long breath, inspired b}^ many feelings. 

“ I will come, but not yet. I must get broken in here more 
thoroughly first. Murewell touches me too deeply, and my 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


553 


wife. You are going abroad in the summer, you say. Let 
me cofiie to you in tlie autumn.” 

The squire said nothing, and went his way* leaning heavily 
on his stick, across the square. Robert felt himself a brute to 
let him go, and almost ran after him. 

Tiiat evening Robert was disquieted by the receipt of a note 
from a young fellow of St. Anselm’s, an intimate friend and 
occasional secretary of Grey- Grey, the writer said, had re¬ 
ceived Robert’s last letter, was deeply interested in his account 
of his work, and begged him to write again. He would have 
written, but that he was liimself in the doctor’s hands, suffer¬ 
ing from various ills, probably connected with an attack of 
malarial fever which had befallen him in Rome the year before. 

Catherine found him poring over the letter, and, as it seemed 
to her, op])ressed by an anxiety out of all proportion to the 
news itself. 

“ They are not really troubled, I think,” she said, kneeling 
down beside him, and laying her cheek against his. “ He 
will soon get over it, Robert.” 

‘‘ But, alas ! this mood, the tender characteristic mood of the 
old Catherine, was becoming rarer and rarer with her. As the 
spring expanded, as the sun and the leaves came back, poor 
Catherine’s temper had only grown more wintry and more 
rigid. Her life was full of moments of acute suffering. Never, 
for instance, did she forget the evening of Robert’s lecture to 
the club. All the time he was away she had sat brooding by 
herself in the drawing-room, divining with a bitter clairvoy¬ 
ance all that scene in which he was taking part, her being 
shaken witli a tempest of misery and repulsion. And together 
with that torturing image of a glaring room in which her hus¬ 
band, once Christ’s loyal minister, was emplojdng all his powers 
of mind and speech to make it easier for ignorant men to desert 
and fight against the Lord who bought them, there mingled a 
hundred memories of her father which were now her constant 
companions. In proportion as Robert and she became more 
divided, her dead father resumed a ghostly hold upon her. 
Tliere were days when she went about rigid and silent, in 
reality living altogether in the past, among the gray farms, 
the crags, and the stony ways of the mountains. 

At such times her mind would be full of pictures of her 
father’s ministrations—his talks with the shepherds on the hills, 
with the women at their doors, his pale dreamer’s face beside 
some wild death-bed, shining with the Divine message, the 
‘‘ visions ” which to her awe-struck childish sense would often 
geem to hold him in their silent walks among the misty hills. 


554 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Robert, taught by many small indications, came to recognize 
these states of feeling in her with a dismal clearness, and to 
shrink more and more sensitively while they lasted from any 
collision with her. He kept his work, his friends, his engage¬ 
ments to himself, talking resolutely of other things, she trying 
to do the same, but with less success, as her nature was less 
pliant than his. 

Then there would come moments when the inward preoccu¬ 
pation would give way, and that strong need of loving, which 
was, after all, the basis of Catherine’s character, would break 
hungrily through, and the wife of their early married days 
would I’eappear, though still only with limitations. A certain 
nervous physical dread of any approach to a particular range 
of subjects with her husband was always present in her. Nay, 
througli all these months, it gradually increased in morbid 
strength. Shock had produced it ; perhaps shock alone could 
loosen the stilling pressure of it. But still every now and then 
her mood was brighter, more caressing, and the area of com¬ 
mon mundane interests seemed suddenly to broaden for them. 

Robert did not always make a wise use of these happier 
times ; he was incessantly possessed with his old idea that if 
she only looiild allow herself some very ordinary intercourse 
Avith his Avorld, her mood Avould become less strained, his occu¬ 
pations and his friends would cease to be such bugbears to her, 
and, for his comfort and hers, she might ultimately be able 
to sympathize Avith certain sides at any rate of his Avork. 

So again and again, Avhen lier manner no longer’threw him 
back on himself, he made efforts and experiments. But he 
managed them far less cleA^erly than he Avould have managed 
anybody else’s affairs, as generally happens. For instance, at 
a period Avhen he Avas feeling more enthusiasm than usual for 
his colleague Wardlaw, and when Catherine Avas more accessi¬ 
ble than usual, it suddenly occurred to him to make an effort 
to bring them together. Brought face to face, each must recog¬ 
nize the nobleness of the other. He felt boyishly confident of 
it. So he'made it a point, tender!}^ but insistently, that Cath¬ 
erine should ask WardlaAV and his Avife to come and see them. 
And Catherine, driven obscurely by a longing to yield in some¬ 
thing, which recurred, and often terrified herself, yielded in this. 

Tlie Wardlaws, Avho in general never Avent into society, Avere 
asked to a quiet dinner in Bedford Square, and came. Then, 
of course, it appeared that Robert, Avith the idealist blindness, 
had forgotten a hundred small differences of temperament and 
training which must make it impossible for Catherine, in a state 
of tension, to see the hei'o in James WavdlaAv. It was an uu- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


555 


lucky dinner. James Wardlaw, with all his heroisms and vir¬ 
tues, had long ago dropped most of those delicate intuitions and 
divinations, which make the charm of life in society, along the 
rough paths of a strenuous ])hilanthi-opy. He had no tact, and, 
like most saints, he drew a certain amount of ins})iration from 
a contented ignorance of his neighbor’s point of view. Also, 
he was not a man who made much of women, and he held 
strong views as to the subordination of wives. It never oc¬ 
curred to him that Robert might have a Dissenter in his own 
liousehold, and as, in spite of their speculative differences, he 
had always been accustomed to talk freely with Robert, he 
now talked freely to Robert plus his wife, assuming, as every 
good Comtist does, that the husband is the wife’s pope. 

Moreover, a solitary, eccentric life, far from tlie society of 
his equals, had developed in him a good many crude Jacobin¬ 
isms. His experience of London clergymen, for instance, had 
not been particular!}^ favorable, and he had a store of anecdotes 
on the subject which Robert had heard before, but which now, 
repeated in Catherine’s presence, seemed to have lost every 
shred of humor they once possessed. Poor Elsmere tried with 
all his might to divert the stream, but it sliowed a tormenting 
tendency to recur to the same channel. And meanwhile the 
little spectacled wife, dressed in a high, home-made cashmere, 
sat looking at her husband with a benevolent and smiling 
admiration. She kept all her eloquence for the poor. 

After dinner things grew worse. Mrs. Wardlaw had recently 
presented her husband with a third infant, and the ardent pair 
had taken advantage of the visit to London of an eminent 
French Comtist to have it baptized with full Comtist rites. 
Wardlaw stood astride on the rug, giving the assembled com¬ 
pany a minute account of the ceremony observed, while his 
wife threw in gentle explanatory interjections. The manner 
of both showed a certain exasperating confidence, if not in 
the active sympathy, at least in tlie impartial curiosity ol' their 
audience, and in the importance to modern religious history of 
the incident itself. Catherine’s silence grew deeper and deeper; 
the conversation fell entirely to Robert. At last Robert, by 
main force, as it were, got Wardlaw off into politics, but the 
new Irish Coercion Bill was hardly introduced before the irre¬ 
pressible being turned to Catherine, and said to her, with 
smiling obtuseness : 

don’t believe I’ve seen you at one of your husband’s 
Sunday addresses yet, Mrs. Plismere ? And it isn’t so far 
from this part of the world either.” 

Catherine slowly raised her beautiful large eyes upon him. 


556 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Robert, looking at her witli a qualm, saw an expression he 
was learning to dread Hashed across the face. 

“I liave my Sunday-school at that time, Mr. Wardlaw. I 
am a Church woman.” 

The tone had a touch of hauteur Robert had hardly ever 
heard from his wife before. It effectually stopped all further 
conversation. Wardlaw fell into silence, reflecting that he had 
been a fool. Ilis wife, with a timid flush, drew out her knit¬ 
ting, and stuck to it for the twenty minutes that remained. 
Catherine immediately did her best to talk, to be pleasant ; 
but the discomfort of the little party was too great. It brokt?’ 
up at ten, and the Wardlaws departed. 

Catherine stood on the rug while Elsmere went with liis 
guests to the door, waiting restlessly for her husband’s return. 
Robert, however, came back to her, tire'd, wounded, and out 
of spirits, feeling that the attempt liad been wholly unsuccess¬ 
ful, and shrinking from any further talk about it. He at once 
sat down to some letters for the late post. Catherine lingered 
a little, watching him, longing miserably, like any girl of 
eighteen, to throw herself on his neck and reproach him for 
their unhappiness, his friends—she knew not what ! He all 
the time was intimately conscious of her preseiwe, of her pale 
beauty, which now at twenty-seven, in spite of its severitjq 
had a subtler finish and attraction than ever, of the restless 
little movements so unlike herself, which she made from time 
to time. But neither spoke except u})on indifferent things. 
Once more the difficult conditions of their lives seemed too 
obvious, too oppressive. Both were ultimately conquered by 
the same sore impulse to let speech alone. 

CHAPTER XLH. 

And after this little scene, through the busv exciting weeks 
of the season which followed, Robert, taxed to the utmost on 
all sides, yielded to the impulse of silence more and more. 

Society was another difficulty between them. Robert de¬ 
lighted in it so far as his East End life allowed him to have it. 
No one was ever more read}^ to take other men and women at 
their own valuation than lie. Nothing was so easy to him as 
to believe in other peojde’s goodness, or cleverness, or super¬ 
human achievement. On the other hand, London is kind to 
such men as Robert Elsmere. His talk, his writing, were be¬ 
coming known and relished; and even the most rigid of the 
old school found it difficult to be angry with him. His knowl¬ 
edge of the poor and of social questions attracted the men of 
actions; his growing historical reputation drew the attention 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


bbl 


of the men of thought. Most people wislied to know him and 
to talk to him, and Catherine, smiled upon for his sake, and 
assumed to be his chief disciple, felt herself more and more 
bewildered and antagonistic as the season rushed on. 

For what pleasure could she get out of these dinners and 
these evenings, which supplied Robert with so much intel¬ 
lectual stimulus ? With her all the moral nerves were jarring 
and out of tune. At any time Richard Leyburn’s daughter 
would have found it hard to tolerate a society where every¬ 
thing is an open question and all confessions of faith are more 
or less bad taste. Rut now, when there was no refuge to fall 
back upon in Robert’s arms, no certainty of his sympathy— 
nay, a certainty~that, however tender and pitiful he might be, 
he would still think her wrong and mistaken ! She went here 
and there obediently because he wished ; but her j^outh 
seemed to be ebbing, the old Murewell gayety entirely left 
her, and people in general wondered why Elsmere should have 
married a wife older than himself, and apparently so unsuited 
to him in temperament. 

Especially was she tiied at Mme. de Netteville’s. For 
Robert’s sake she tried for a time to put aside her first im¬ 
pression and to bear Mine, de Netteville’s evenings—little 
dreaming, poor thing, all the time that Mme. de Netteville 
thought her presence at the famous “ Fridays ” an incubus 
only to be put up with, because the husband was becoming 
socially an indispensable. 

But after two or three Fridays Catherine’s endurance failed 
her. On the last occasion she found herself, late in the even¬ 
ing, hemmed in behind ^Ime. de Netteville and a distinguished 
African explorer, who was the lion of the evening. Eugenie 
de Netteville had forgotten her silent neighbor, and presently, 
with some biting little phrase or other, she asked the great 
man his opinion on a burning topic of tlie da}", the results of 
Church Missions in Africa. The great man laughed, shrugged 
his shoulders, and ran lightly through a string of stories in 
which both missionaries and converts played parts which were 
either grotesque or worse. Mme. de Netteville thought the 
stories amusing, and as one ceased she provoked another, her 
black eyes full of a dry laughter, her white hand lazily plying 
her great ostrich fan. 

Suddenly a figure rose behind them. 

“ Oh, Mrs. Elsmere ! ” said Mme. de Netteville, starting, 
and then coolly recovering herself. “ I had no idea you were 
there all alone. I am afraid our conversation has been dis¬ 
agreeable to you. I am afraid you are a friend of missions ! ” 


558 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


And her glance, turning from Catherine to her companion, 
made a little malicious signal to him which only he detected, 
as though bidding him take note of a curiosity. 

“ Yes, I care for them, I wish for their success,” said Cath¬ 
erine, one hand, which trembled slightly, resting on the table 
beside her, her great gray eyes fixed on Mine, de Netteville. 
“ No Christian has any right to do otherwise.” 

Poor, brave, goaded soul ! She had a vague idea of “ bearing 
testimony ” as her father would have boi-ne it in like circum¬ 
stances. But she turned very pale. Even to her the woi*d 
“ Christian ” sounded like a bomb-shell in that room. The 
great traveler looked up astounded, lie saw a tall woman in 
white with a beautiful head, a delicate face, a something inde¬ 
scribably noble and unusual in her whole look and attitude. 
She looked like a Quaker jirophetess—like Dinah Morris in 
society—like—but his comparisons failed him. How did such 
a being come there f He was amazed ; but he was a man of 
taste, and Mine, de Netteville caught a certain a?sthetic appro¬ 
bation in his look. 

She rose, her expression hard and bright as usual. 

“ May one Christian pronounce for all ? ” she said, with a 
scornful affectation of meekness. “Mrs. Elsmere, please find 
some chair more comfortable than that ottoman ; and Mr. Ans- 
dale, will you come and be introduced to Lady Aubrey ? ” 

After her guests had gone Mme. de Netteville came back to 
the fire, flushed and frowning. It seemed to her that in that 
strange little encounter she had suffei'ed, and she never forgot 
or forgave the smallest social discomfiture. 

“ Can I put up with that again ? ” she asked herself, with a 
contemptuous hardening of the lij). “ I suppose I must if he 
can not be got without her. But I have an instinct that it is 
over—that she will not appear here again. Daudet might 
make use of her. I can’t. What a sjiecimen ! A boy and girl 
match, I su])pose. What else could have induced that poor 
wretch to cut his throat in such fashion ? He, of all men ! ” 

And Eugenie de Netteville stood thinking—not, apparently, 
of the puritanical wife ; the dangerous softness which over¬ 
spread the face could have had no connection with Catherine. 

Mme. de Netteville’s instinct was just. Catherine Elsmere 
never appeared again in her drawing-i'oom. 

But,with a little sad confession ol iier own invim'ible distaste, 
the wife pressed the husband to go without luu-. She urged it 
at a bitter moment, when it was clear to her that their lives 
must of necessity, even in outward matters, be more separate 
than before. Elsmere resisted for a time j then, lured one even- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


559 


ing toward the end of February by the prospect conveyed in a 
note from Mine, de Netteville, wherein Catherine was men¬ 
tioned in the most scrupulously civil terms, of meeting one of 
the most eminent of French critics, he went, and thencefor¬ 
ward went often. lie had, so far, no particular liking for the 
hostess ; he hated some of her habitues; but there was no doubt 
that in some ways she made an admirable holder of a salon, 
and that round about her there was a subtle mixture of ele¬ 
ments, a liberty of discussion and comment, to be found no¬ 
where else. And how bracing and refreshing was that free 
play of equal mind to the man weary sometimes of his lead¬ 
er’s role and weary of himself ! 

As to the woman, his social naivete,which was extraordinary, 
but in a man of his type most natural, made him accept her ex¬ 
actly as he found her. If there were two or three people in 
Paris or London who knew or suspected incidents of Mine, de 
Netteville’s young married days which made her reception at 
some of the strictest English houses a matter of cynical amuse¬ 
ment to them, not the remotest inkling of their knowledge was 
ever likely to reach Elsmere. He was not a man who attracted 
scandals. Nor was it anybody’s interest to spread them. Mme. 
de Netteville’s position in London society was obviously excel¬ 
lent. If she had peculiarities of manner and speech, they were 
easily supposed to be French. Meanwhile she was undeniably 
rich and distinguished, and gifted with a most remarkable power 
of protecting herself and her neighbors from boredom. At the 
same time, though Elsmere was, in truth, more interested in 
her friends than in her, he could not possibly be insensible to 
the consideration shown for him in her drawing-room. Mme. 
de Netteville allowed herself plenty of jests with her intimates 
as to the young reformer’s social siinplicit}^ his dreams, his 
optimisms. But those intimates were the first to notice that as 
soon as he entered the room those optimisms of his were adroitly 
respected. She had various delicate contrivances for giving him 
the lead ; she exercised a kind of surveillance over the topics 
introduced ; or in conversation with him she would play that 
most seductive part of the cynic shamed out of cynicism by the 
neighborhood of the enthusiast. 

Presentl}^ she began to claim a practical interest in his El- 
good Street work. Her offers were made with a curious mixt¬ 
ure of symjiathy and mockery. Elsmere could not take her 
seriously. But neither could he refuse to accept her money, if 
she chose to spend it on a library for Elgood Street, or to con¬ 
sult with her about the choice oi books. This whim of hers 
created a cei'taiii friendly bond between them which was not 


560 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


present before. And on Elsmere’s side it was strengthened 
when, one evening, in a corner of lier inner drawing-room. 
Mine, de Netteville suddenly, but very quietly, told him the 
story of her life—her English youth, her elderly French hus¬ 
band, the death of her only child, and her flight as a young 
widow to England during the war of 1870. She told the story 
of the child, as it seemed to Elsmere, Avith a deliberate avoid¬ 
ance of emotion, nay, even with a certain liarshness. But it 
touched him profoundly. And everything else that she said, 
though she professed no great regret for her husband, or for 
the break-up of her French life, and though everything Avas 
reticent and measured, deepened the impression of a real for¬ 
lornness behind all the outAA^ard brilliance and social impor¬ 
tance. lie began to feel a deep and kindly pity for her, 
coupled AAUth an earnest Avish that he would help her to make 
her life more adequate and satisfying. And all this he showed 
in the look of his frank, gray eyes, in the cordial grasp of the 
hand Avith Avhich he said good-by to her. 

Mine, de Netteville’s gaze followed him out of the room— 
the tall, boyish flgure, the nobly carried head. The riddle of 
her flushed cheek and sparkling eyes Avas hard to read. But 
there Avere one or two persons living Avho could haA^e read it, 
and Avho could have AA^arned you that the true story of Eugenie 
de Netteville’s life Avas Avritten, not in her literary studies oi¬ 
lier social triumphs, but in A-arious recurrent outbreaks of un¬ 
bridled impulse—the secret, and in one or tAvo cases the 
shameful landmarks of her past. And, as persons of experi¬ 
ence, .they could also have Avarned you that the cold intriguer, 
alAA^ays mistress of herself, only exists in fiction, and that a 
certain poisoned and feverish interest in the religious leader, 
the young and pious priest, as such, is common enough among 
the corrupter Avomen of all societies. 

ToAvard the end of May she asked Elsmere to dine ‘‘ en 
petit comite^ a gentleman’s dinner—except for my cousin, 
Lad}^ Aubrey Willert”—to meet an eminent Liberal Catholic, 
a friend of Montalembert’s youth. 

It Avas a week or tAvo after the failure of the Wardlaw ex¬ 
periment. Do Avhat each Avould, the sore silence betAveen the 
husband and Avife Avas groAving, AA^as SAvalloAving up more of life. 

“ Shall I go, Catherine ? ” he asked, handing her the note. 

“ It Avould interest you,” she said gently, giving it back to 
him scrupulously, as tliough she had notlung to do Avith it. 

He knelt doAvn before her, and put his arms round her, 
looking at her with eyes Avhich had a dumb and yet fiery ap¬ 
peal Avritten in them. His heart Avas hungry for that old 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


561 


clinging dependence, tliat willing weakness of love her youth 
had yielded him so gladly, instead of this silent strength of 
ajitagonism. The memory of her Miirevvell self flashed miser¬ 
ably through him as he knelt there, of her delicate penitence 
toward him after her flrst sight of Newcome, of their night 
walks during the Mile End epidemic. Did he hold now in his 
arms only the ghost and shadow of that Murewell Catherine. 

She must have read the reproach, the j^earning of Ids look, 
for she gave a little shiver, as though bracing herself with a 
•kind of agony to resist. • 

“ Let me go, Robert! ” she said gently, kissing him on the 
forehead and drawing back. “ I liear Mary calling and nurse 
is out.” 

The days went on, and the date of Mme. de Netteville’s 
dinner-party had come round. About seven o’clock that 
evening Catherine sat with the child in the drawing-room ex¬ 
pecting Robert. He had gone off early in the afternoon to 
the East End with Hugh Flaxman to take part in a committee 
of workmen organized for the establishment of a choral union 

in R-, the scheme of which had been Flaxrnan’s chief 

contribution so far to the Elgood Street undertaking. 

It seemed to her as she sat there working, the windows 
open on to the bit of garden, where the trees were already 
withered and begrimed, that the air without and her heart 
within were alike stifling and heavy with storm. Something 
must put an end to this oppression, this misery ! She did not 
know herself. Her whole inner being seemed to her lessened 
and degraded by this silent struggle, this fever of the soul, 
which made im})Ossible all those serenities and sweetnesses of 
tliought in which lier nature had always lived of old. The 
tight into which fate had forced her was destroying her. She 
was drooping like a plant cut off from all that nourished its life. 

And yet she never conceived it possible that she should re- 
limpiish that fight. Nay, at times there sprung up in her now 
a dangerous and despairing foresight of even worse things in 
store. In the middle of her suffering she already began to 
feel at moments the ascetic’s terrible sense of compensation. 
AThat, after all, is the Christian life but warfare ? “ I came 

not to send peace^ but a sioord! ” 

Yes, in these June days Elsmere’s happiness was perhaps 
nearer wreck than it had ever been. All strong natures grow 
restless under such a pressure as was now weighing on Cath¬ 
erine. Shock and outburst become inevitable. 

So she sat alone this hot afternoon, haunted by presenti¬ 
ments, by vague terror for herself and him j while the child 



5G2 


ROBERT ELSMERB. 


tottered about lier, cooing, slioutiiig, kissing, and all impul¬ 
sively, with a ceaseless energy, like her father. 

The outer door opened, and she heard Robert’s step, and ap¬ 
parently Mr. Flaxnian’s also. There was a hurried, subdued 
word or two in the hall, and the two entered the room where 
slie was sitting. 

Robert came, pressing back the hair from his eyes with a 
gesture which with him was the invariable accompaniment of 
mental trouble. Catherine sprang up. 

“ Robert, you look so tired ! and how late you are ! ” Then ^ 
as she came nearer to him : “ And your coat— torn — blood! ” 

“ There is notliing wrong with me, dear,” he said hastily, 
taking her hands—“ nothing ! Rut it has been an awful after¬ 
noon. Flaxman will tell you. I must go to this place, I sup¬ 
pose, though I hate the thought of it ! Flaxman, will you 
tell her all about it ? ” And, loosing his hold, he went heavily 
out of the room and upstairs. 

‘‘ It has been an accident,” said Flaxman gently, coming 
forward, “to one of the men of his class. May we sit down, 
Mrs. Elsmere ? Your husband and I have gone through a 

o o 

good deal these last two hours.” 

He sat down with a long breath, evidently tiying to regain 
Ids ordinary even manner. His clothes, too, were covered with 
dust, and his hand shook. Catherine stood before him in con¬ 
sternation, while a nurse came for the child. 

“ We had just begun our committee at four o’clock,” he said 
at last, “ though only about half of the men had arrived, when 
there was a great shouting and commotion outside, and a man 
rushed in calling for Elsmere. We ran out, found a great 
crowd, a huge brewer’s dray standing in the street, and a man 
run over. Your husband pushed his way in. I followed, and, 
to my horror, I found him kneeling by Charles Richards ! ” 

“ Charles Richards ? ” Catherine repeated vacantly. 

Flaxman looked up at her, as though puzzled ; then a flash 
of astonishment passed over his face. 

“ Elsmere has never told yon of Charles Richards, the little 
gas-fitter, who has been his right hand for the past three 
months ? ” 

“ No—never,” she said slowly. 

Again he looked astonished ; then he went on, sadly : “ All 
this spring he has been your husband’s shadow—I never saw 
such devotion. We found him lying in the middle of the 
road. He had only just left work, a man said who had been 
with him, and was running to the meeting. He slipped and 
fell, crossing the street, which was muddy from last night’s 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


568 


rain. The dray swung round the corner—tlie driver was 
drunk or careless—and they went right over liirn. One foot 
was a sickening sight. Your husband and I bickily knew how 
to lift him for the best. We sent olf for doctors. His home 
was in the next street, as it happened—nearer than any hospital 
so we carried him there. Tlie neighbors were round the door.” 

Then he stopped himself. 

“ Shall I tell 3^ou the whole story ? ” he said kindly ; “ it has 
been a tragedy! I won’t give you details if you had rather not.” 

“ Oh, no ! ” she said, hurriedly ; “no—tell me.” 

And she forgot to feel any wonder that Flaxman, in his chiv¬ 
alry, should treat her as though she were a girl with nerves. 

“ Well, it was the surroundings that were so ghastly. When 
we got to the licMise an old woman rushed at me—‘ His wife’s 
in there, but ye’ll not find her in her senses ; she’s been at it 
from eight o’clock this morning. We’ve took the children 
away.’ I didn’t know what she meant exactly till we got into 
the little front room. There, such a spectacle ! A young 
woman on a chair by the fire sleeping heavily, dead drunk ; the 
breakfast things on the table, the sun blazing in on the dust 
and the dirt, and on the woman’s face. I wanted to carry him 
into the room on the other side—he was unconscious ; but a 
doctor had come up with us, and made us put him down on a 
bed there ^vas in the corner. Then we got some brandy and 
poured it down. The doctor examined him, looked at his foot, 
threw something over it. ‘ Nothing to be done,’ he said—‘ in¬ 
ternal injuries—he can’t live half an hour.’ The next minute 
the poor fellow opened his eyes. They had pulled away the 
bed from the wall. Your husband was on the further side, kneel¬ 
ing. When he opened his eyes,clearly the first thing he saw was 
his wife. He half sprang up—Elsmere caught him—and gave 
a horrible cry—indescribably horrible. ^At it agairiy at it 
again. My God!'^ Then he fell back fainting. They got the 
w'ife out of the room between them—a perfecting—you could 
hear her heavy breathing from the kitchen opposite. We gave 
him more brandy and he came to again. He looked up in your 
husband’s face. ‘ She hasn’t broke out for two months,’ he 
said, so piteously, ‘two months—and now—I’m done^—I’m 
(^one—and she’ll just go straight to the devil ! ’ And it comes 
out, so the neighbors told us, that for two years or more he had 
been patiently trying to reclaim this woman, without a word 
of complaint to anybody, though his life must have been a 
dog’s life. And now, on his death-bed, what seemed to be 
breaking his heart was, not that he was dying, but that his 
task was snatched from him 1 ” 


564 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Flaxmaii pauscnl, and looked away out of window. He 
told his stoiy with difficulty. 

“ Your husband tried to comfort him—promised that the 
wife and children should be his special care, that everything 
that could be done to save and protect them should be done. 
And the poor little fellow looked up at him, with the tears run¬ 
ning down his cheeks, and—and—blessed him. ‘I cared 
nothing,’he said, ‘when j^ou came. You’ve been—God—to 
me—I’ve seen him—in you.’ Then he asked us to say some¬ 
thing. Your husband said verse after verse of the Psalms, of 
the Gospels, of St. Paul. His eyes grew filmy, but he seemed 
eveiy now and then to struggle back to life, and as soon as he 
caught Elsmere’s face his look lightened. Toward the last he 
said sonietliing we none of us caught ; but your husband 
thought it was a line from Emily Bronte’s ‘ Hymn,’ which he 
said to them last Sunday in lecture.” 

He looked up at her interrogatively, but there was no re¬ 
sponse in her face. 

“ I asked him about it,” the speaker went on, “ as we came 
home. He said Grey of St. Anselm’s once quoted it to him, 
and he has had a love for it ever since.” 

“ Did he die while you were there ? ” asked Catherine pres¬ 
ently, after a silence. Her voice was dull and quiet. He 
thought her a strange woman. 

“ No,” said Flaxman, almost sharply ; “ but by now it must 
be over. Tlie last sign of consciousness was the murmur of his 
children’s names. Tliey brought them in, but his hands had 
to be guided to them. A few minutes after it seemed to me 
that he Avas really gone, though he still breathed. The doctor 
was certain there Avould be no more consciousness. We stayed 
nearly another hour. Then his brother came, and some other 
relations, and Ave left him. Oh, it is over now ! ” 

Hugh Flaxman sat looking out into the dingy bit of London 
garden. Penetrated with pity as he Avas, he felt the presence 
of Elsmere’s pale, silent, unsjunpathetic Avife an oppression. 
How could she receive such a story in such a way ? 

The door opened and Robert came in hurriedl}^ 

“ Good-night, Catherine—he has told 3^011 ? ” 

He stood by her, his hand on her shoulder, wistfully look¬ 
ing at her, the face full of signs of Avhat he had gone through. 
“Yes, it Avas terrible ! ” she said, Avith an effort. 

His face fell. He kissed her on the forehead and Avent awaA\ 
When he Avas gone, Flaxman suddenly got up and leaned 
against the open French Avindow, looking keenly down on his 
companion. A ncAV idea had stirred in him. 


nOBERT EL8MERE, 


565 


And presently, after more talk of the incident of the after¬ 
noon, and when he had recovered his usual mginner, he slipped 
gradually into the subject of liis own experiences in North 

R-during the last six montlis. He assumed all through 

that she knew as much as there was to know of Elsmere’s 
work, and tliat she was as much interested as the normal wife 
is in lier luisband’s doings. Ilis tact, his delicacy, never failed 
him for a moment. But he spoke of his own impressions, of 
matters witliin his personal knowledge. And since tlie Easter 
sermon he had been much on Elsmere’s track ; he had been 
filled witli curiosity about him. 

Catherine sat a little way from him, her blue dress lying in 
long folds about her, her head bent, her long fingers crossed 
on her lap. Sometimes she gave liirn a startled look, some¬ 
times she shaded her eyes, while her other hand played silently 
with her watch-chain. Flaxman, watching her closely, how¬ 
ever little he might seem to do so, was struck by her austere 
and delicate beauty as he had never been before. 

She hardly spoke all through, but he felt that she listened 
without resistance, nay, at least that she listened with a kind 
of hunger. He went from story to story, from scene to scene, 
without any excitement, in his most ordinary manner, making 
his reserves now and then, expressing his own opinion when it 
occurred to him, and not always favorably. But gradually 
the whole picture emerged, began to live before them. At 
last he hurriedly looked at his watch. 

What a time I have kept you ! It has been a relief to 
talk to you.” 

“ You liave not had dinner ! ” she said, looking up at him 
with a sudden nervous bewilderment which touched him and 
subtly changed his impression of her. 

‘‘ No matter. I will get some at home. Good night! ” 

When he was gone she carried the child up to bed ; her 
supper was brought to her solitary in the dining-room ; and 
afterward in the drawing-room, where a soft twilight was 
fading into a soft and starlighted night, she mechanically 
brought out some work for Mary, and sat bending over it by 
the window. After about an hour she looked up straight 
before her, threw her work down, and slipped on to the floor, 
her head resting on the chair. 

The shock, the storm, had come. There for hours lay Cath¬ 
erine Elsmere weeping her heart away, wrestling with herself, 
with memory, with God. It was the greatest moral upheaval 
she had ever known—greater even than that which had con¬ 
vulsed her life at Murewell, 



566 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


CHAPTER XLIIL 

Robert, tired and sick at heart, felt himself in no mood 
this evening for a dinner party in which conversation would 
be treated more or less as a line art. Liberal Catholicism had 
lost its charm ; his sympathetic interest in Montalembert, 
Lacordaire, Lamennais, had to be quickened, pumped up again 
as it were, by great efforts, which were constantly relaxed 
within him as he sped westward by the recurrent memory of 
that miserable room, the group of men, the bleeding hand, 
the white dying face. 

In Mm. de Netteville’s drawing-room he found a small 
number of people assembled. M. de Querouelle, a middle- 
sized, round-headed old gentleman of a familiar French type ; 
Lady Aubrey, thinner, more lath-like than ever, clad in some 
sumptuous mingling of dark red and silver ; Lord Rupert, 
beaming under the recent introduction of a Land Purchase 
Bill for Ireland, by which he saw his way at last to wash his 
hands of “ a beastly set of tenants,” Mr. Wharncliffe, a young 
private secretary with a waxed mustache, six feet of height, 
and a general air of superlativeness which demanded and 
secured attention ; a famous journalist, whose smiling self-re- 
pressive look assured you that he carried with him the secrets 
of several empires ; and one Sir John Headlam,a little black¬ 
haired Jewish-looking man with a limp—an ex-colonial gov¬ 
ernor, who had made himself accepted in London as an amus¬ 
ing fellow, but who was at least as much disliked by one-half 
of society as he was popular with the other. 

“ Purely for talk, you see, not for show ! ” said Mme. de 
Xetteville to Robert, with a little smiling nod round her circle, 
as they stood waiting for the commencement of dinner. 

“ I shall hardly do my part,” he said wdth a little sigh. “ I 
have just come from a very different scene.” 

She looked at him with inquiring eyes. 

“ A terrible accident in the East End,” he said briefly. 
“We won’t talk of it. I only mention it to propitiate you 
beforehand. Those things are not forgotten at once.” 

She said no more, but, seeing that he was indeed out of heart, 
physically and mentally, she showed the most subtle considera¬ 
tion for him at dinner. M. de Querouelle was made to talk. 
His hostess wound him up and set him going, tune after tune. 
He played them all, and, by dint of long practice, to perfec¬ 
tion, in the French wa}". A visit of his youth to the island grave 
of Chateaubriand ; his early memories, as a poetical as]nrant, 
of the magnificent flatteries by wliich Victor Hugo made hint- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


567 


self tlie god of young roniuiitic Paris ; bis talks with Montaleni- 
bert in the days of L"*Avenir; his memories of Lamennais’s 
sombre figure, of Maurice de Gueriifs feverish ethereal charm ; 
his account of the opposition salons under the Empire—they 
had all been elaborated in the course of years, till every word 
fitted and each point led to the next with the “inevitableness” 
of true art. Robert, at first silent and distrait, iomA it impos¬ 
sible after awhile not to listen with interest. lie admired the 
skill, too, of Mine de Netteville’s second in the duet, the finish, 
the alternate sjiarkle and melancholy of it ; and at last he too 
was drawn in, and found himself listened to with great benevo¬ 
lence by the Frenchman, who had been informed about him, 
and regarded him indulgently, as one more curious specimen of 
English religious provincialisms. The journalist, Mr. Addle- 
stone, who had won a European reputation for wisdom by a 
great scantiness of speech in society, coupled with the look of 
Minerva’s owl, attachedTimself to them ; while Lady Aubrey, 
Sir John Headlam, Lord Rupert, and Mr. Wharncliffe made a 
noisier and more dashing party at the other end. 

“ Are you still in your old quarters. Lad3^ Aubrey ? ” asked 
Sir John Headlam, turning his old roguish face upon her. 
“ That house of Nell GWynne’s, wasn’t it, in Meade Street ? ” 
“ Oh, dear, no ! We could only get it up to May this year, 
and then the}" made us turn out for the season, for the first time 
for ten years. There is a tiresome young heir who has married 
a wife and wants to live in it. I could have left a train of 
gunpowder and a slow match behind, I was so cross! ’’ 

“Ah—‘ Redder pour mieux faire sauter ! said Sir John, 

mincing out his pun as though he loved it. 

“ Not bad. Sir John,” she said, looking at him calmly, “ but 
you have way to make up. You were so dull the last time you 
took me in to dinner, that positively—” 

“ You began to wonder to what I owed my paragraph in the 
Societe des Londres^'^ he rejoined smiling, though a close 
observer might have seen an angry flash in his little eyes. “ My 
de^r Lady Aubrey, it was simply because I had not seen you 
for six weeks. My education had been neglected. I got my art 
and my literature from you. The last time but one we met, you 
gave me the cream of three new French novels and all the dra¬ 
matic scandal of the period. I have lived on it for weeks. 

By the way, have you read the ‘ Princesse de-?’ ” 

He looked at her audaciously. The book had affronted 
even Paris. 

“I haven’t,” she said, adjusting her bracelets, while she 
flashed a rapier-glance at him, “ but if Iliad, I should say 



568 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


precisely the same. Lord Rupert, will you kindly keep Sir 
John in order?” 

Lord Rupert plunged in with the gallant floundering motion 
characteristic of him, while Mr. Wharnclilfe followed like a 
modern gun-boat behind a three-decker. That young man was 
a delusion. The casual spectator, to borrow a famous Cam¬ 
bridge mot, invariably assumed that all “the time he could 
s})are from neglecting his duties he must spend in adorning his 
person.” Not at all! The tenue of a dandy was never more 
cleverly used to mask the schemes of a Disraeli or the hard am¬ 
bition of a Tallejn-and than in Master Frederick Wharnclilfe, 
who was in reality going up the ladder hand over hand, and 
meant very soon to be on tlie top rungs. 

It was a curious party, typical of the house, and of a certain 
stratum of London. When, every now and then, in the pauses 
of their own conversation, Elsmere caught something of the 
chatter going on at the other end of the table, or when the 
party became fused into one for a while under the genial influ¬ 
ence of a good story or the exhilaration of a personal skirmish, 
the whole scene—the dainty oval room, the lights, the ser¬ 
vants, the exquisite fruit and flowers, the gleaming silver, the 
tapestried walls—would seem to him for an instant like a 
mirage, a dream, yet with something glittering and arid about 
it wdiich a dream never has. 

The hard self-confldence of these people—did it belong to 
the same world as that humbling, that heavenly self-abandon¬ 
ment wdiich had shone on him that afternoon from Charles 
Richard’s begrimed and blood-stained face ? “ Blessed are the 
poor in spirit'’’ he said to himself once, with an imvard groan. 
“ Why am I here ? Why am I not at home w ith Catherine ? ” 

Rut Mine, de Netteville w'as pleasant to him. He had never 
seen her so w^omanly, never felt more grateful for her delicate 
social skill. As she talked to him, or to the Frenchman, of 
litei-ature, or politics, or famous folk, flashing her beautiful 
eyes from one to the other. Sir John Headlam wmuld, every 
now' and then, turn his odd puckered face observantly toward 
the further end of the table. 

“ Ry Jove!” he said afterwards to Wharncliffe as they 
w'alked aw'ay from the door together, “ she w'as inimitable to¬ 
night ; she lias more roles than Desforets !” Sir John and 
his hostess w'ere veiy old friends. 

Upstairs smoking began. Lady Aubrey and Mme. de Nette¬ 
ville joining in. M. de Qnerouelle, having talked the best of 
his repertoire at dinner, w'as now inclined for amusement, and 
had discovered that Lad}'^ Aubrey could amuse him, and was, 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


569 


moreover, une belle personne. Mme. de Netteville was obliged 
to give some time to Lord Rupert. The other men stood chat¬ 
ting politics and the latest news, till Robert, conscious of a 
complete failure of social eneVgy, began to look at his watch. 
Instantly Mme. de Netteville glided up to him. 

Mr. Elsmere, you have talked no business to me, and I 
must know hoV my affairs in Elgood Street are getting on. 
Come into my little writing-room.” And she led him into a 
tiny paneled room at the far end of the drawing-room and 
shut off from it by a heavy curtain, which she now left half 
drawn. 

‘‘ The latest? ” said Fred Wharncliffe to Lady Aubrey, raising 
his eyebrows with the slightest motion of the head, toward the 
writing-room. 

“ I suppose so,” she said indifferently ; “ she is East-Ejiding 
for a change. AYe all do it nowadays. It is like Dizzy’s young 
man who ‘ liked bad wine, he was so bored with good.’ ” 

Meanwhile Mme. de Netteville was leaning against the open 
window of the fantastic little room, with Robert beside her. 

“ You look as if you had had a strain,” she said to him 
abruptly, after they had talked business for a few minutes. 
“ What has been the matter ? ” 

He told her Richard’s story very shortly. It would have 
been impossible to him to give more than the diyest outline of 
it in that room. His companion listened gravely. She was 
an epicure in all things, especially in moral sensation, and she 
liked his moments of reserve and strong self-control. They 
made his general expansiveness more distinguished. 

Presently there was a pause, which she broke by saying : 

‘‘I was at your lecture last Sunday—you didn’t see me ! ” 

“ Were you ? Ah, I remember a person in black, and veiled, 
who puzzled me. I don’t think we want you there, Madame 
de Netteville.” 

His look was pleasant, but his tone had some decision in it. 

“ Why not ? Is it only the artisans who have souls ? A re¬ 
former should refuse no one.” 

“ You have your own opportunities,” he said quietly ; “I 
think the men prefer to have it to themselves for the present. 
Some of them are dreadfully in eaimest.” 

“ Oh, I don’t pretend to be in earnest,” she said with a 
little wave of her hand ; “ or, at any rate, I know better than 
to talk of earnestness to youy 

“ Why to me ? ” he asked, smiling. 

“ Oh, because you and your like have your fixed ideas of the 
upper class and the lower. One social type fills up your hori- 


5V0 


R0BER2 ELSMERE, 


zon. You are not interested in any other, and, indeed, you 
know nothing of any other.” 

She looked at him deliantly. Everything about her to-night 
was splendid and regal—her dress of black and white brocade, 
the diamonds at her throat, the carriage of her head, nay, the 
marks of experience and living on the dark, subtle face. 

‘‘ Perhaps not,” he replied ; “ it is enough for one life to try 
and make out where the English working class is tending to.” 

“ You are quite wrong, utterly wrong. The man who keeps 
his eye oidy on the lower class will achieve nothing. AVhat 
can the idealist do without the men of action—the men who 
can take his beliefs and make them enter by violence into ex¬ 
isting institutions ? And the men of action are to be found 
with 

“ It hardly looks just now as if the upper class Avas to go on 
enjoying a monopoly of them,” he said smiling. 

“ Then appearances are deceptive. The })opulace supplies 
mass and weight—nothing else. What you Avant is to touch 
the leaders, the men and women Avhose voices carry, and then 
your populace Avould follow hard enongh. For instance ”— 
as she dropped her aggressive tone and spoke Avith a smiling 
kindness—“ come down next Saturday to my little Surrey cot¬ 
tage ; you shall see some of these men and Avomen there, and I 
Avill make you confess Avhen you go away that you have prof¬ 
ited your Avorkmen more b}" deserting them than by staying 
AAuth them. Will you come ? 

“ My Sunda3"s are too precious to me just now, Madame de 
Netteville. Besides, my lirm conviction is that the upper class 
can produce a Brook Farm, but nothing more. The religious 
movement of the future will Avant a vast effusion of feeling and 
passion to carry it into action, and feeling and passion are only 
to be generated in sufficient A^olume among the masses, Avhere 
the vested interests of all kinds are less tremendous. You 
upper-class folk have your part, of course. AYoe betide you if 
you shirk it—but—” 

“ Oh, let us leaA^e it alone,” she said with a little shrug. 
“ I knoAV you Avould give us all the work and refuse us all the 
profits. We are to staiwe for your workman, to give him our 
hearts and purses and everything Ave haA^e, not that Ave may 
hoodwink him—Avhich might be worth doing—but that he may 
rule us. It is too much ! ” 

‘Wery well,” he said diyly, his color rising. “ Veiy well, 
let it be too much.” 

And dropping his lounging attitude, he stood erect, and she 
saw that he meant to be going. Her look swept o\ er him fi'om 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


5Vl 

head to foot—over the worn face with its look of sensitive re¬ 
finement and spiritual force, the active frame, the delicate but 
most characteristic hand. Never had any man so attracted 
her for years; never had sbe found it so difficult to gain a hold. 
Eugenie de Netteville, 2>osense^ sclienier, woman of the world 
that she was, was losing command of hei'self. 

“ What did you really mean by ‘ worldliness’ and the ‘ world’ 
in your lecture last Sunday ?” she asked him suddenly, with 
a little accent of scorn. “I thought your diatribes absurd. 
What you religious people call the ‘ world ’ is really only the 
average opinion of sensible people which neither you nor your 
kind could do without fora day.” 

He smiled, half amused by her provocative tone, and de¬ 
fended himself not very seriousl}-. But she threw all her 
strength into the argument, and he forgot that he had meant 
to go at once. When she chose she could talk admirably, and 
she chose now. She had the most aggressive ways of attack¬ 
ing, and then, in the same breath, the most subtle and softening 
ways of yielding and, as it were, of asking pardon. Directly 
her antagonist turned upon her he found himself disarmed 
he knew not how. The disputant disappeared, and he felt the 
woman, restless, melancholy, sympathetic, hungry for fidend- 
ship and esteem, yet too pi’oud to make any direct bid for 
either. It was impossil)le not to be interested and touched. 

Such at least was the woman whom Robert Elsmere felt. 
Whether in his hours of intimacy with her, twelve months 
before, young Alfred Evershed had received the same impres¬ 
sion may be doubted. In all things Eugenie de Netteville was 
an artist. 

Suddenly the curtain dividing them from the larger drawing¬ 
room was drawn back, and Sir John Headlain stood in the 
doorway. He had the glittering, amused eyes of a malicious 
child as he looked at them. 

“ Very Sony, madame,” he began, in his high, cracked voice, 
^but Wharncliffe and I are off to the New Club to see Des- 
for^ts. They have got her there to-night.” 

“ Go,” she said, waving her hand to him ; “ I don’t envy 
you. She is not what she was.” 

“No, there is only one person,” he. said, bowing with gro¬ 
tesque little airs of gallantry, “ for whom time stands still.” 

Mine, de Netteville looked at him with smiling, half-con¬ 
temptuous serenity. He bowed again, this time with ironical 
emphasis, and disappeared. 

“ Perhaps I had better go back and send them off,” she said, 
rising. “ But you and I have not had our talk out yet.” 


572 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


She led the way into the drawing-room. Lady Aubrey was 
lying back on the velvet sofa, a little green paroquet that was 
accustomed to wander tamely about the room perching on her 
hand. She was holding the field against Lord Rupert and Mr. 
Addlestone in a three-cornered duel of wits, while M. de 
Qnerouelle sat by, his plump hands on his knees, applauding. 

They all rose as their hostess came in. 

“ My dear,” said Lady Aubrey, “ it is disgracefully early, 
but 1113^ coiintiy before pleasure. It is the Foreign Office to¬ 
night, and since James took office I can’t with decenc\^ absent 
myself. I had rather be a sculleiy-maid than a minister’s wife. 
Lord Rupert, I will take 3^ou on if you Avant a lift.” 

Sli^ touched Mine, de Netteville’s cheek with her lips, nod¬ 
ding to the other men present, and went out, her fair, stag-like 
head well in the air, “ chaffing ” Lord Rupert, who obediently 
followed her, performing marvelous feats of agility in his de¬ 
sire to keep out of the way of the superb train sweeping behind 
her. It alwaj^s seemed as if Lady Aubre}" could have had no 
childhood, as if she must alwaj^s have had just that voice and 
those eyes. Tears she could never have shed, not even as a 
bab}' over a broken toy. Besides, at no period of her life could 
she have looked upon a lost possession as an^Thing else than 
the opportunit}^ for a new one. 

The other men took their departure for one reason or another. 
It was not late, but London was in full swing, and M. de Que- 
rouelle talked with gusto of four “ At homes ” still to be grap¬ 
pled with. 

As she dismissed Mr. Wharncliffe, Robert too held out his 
hand. 

“No,” she said, with a quick impetuousness, “no; I want 
my talk out. It is barely half-past ten, and neither of us 
want to be racing about London to-night.” 

Elsmere had always a certain lack of social decision, and he 
lingered rather reluctantly—for another ten minutes, as he 
supposed. 

She threAv herself into a low chair. The AvindoAvs Avere open 
to the back of me house, and the roar of Piccadilh^ and Sloane 
Street came borne in upon the Avarm night air. Her superb 
dark head stood out against a stand of yelloAv lilies close behind 
her, and the little paroquet, bright Avith all the colors of the 
tropics perched now on her knee, noAvon the back of her chair, 
touched eveiy noAV and then by quick, unsteadA’’ fingers. 

Then an incident folloAved VAdiich Elsmere remembered to 
his d^dng day Avith shame and humiliation. 

In ten minutes from the time of their being left alone a 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


57S 

woman who was five years his senior had made him what was 
practically a confession of love—had given him to understand 
that she knew what were*the relations between himself and 
his wife—and had implored him with the quick breath of an 
indescribable excitement to see what a woman’s sympathy and 
a woman’s unique devotion could do for the causes he had at 
heart. 

The truth broke upon Elsmere very slowly, awakening in 
him, when at last it was unmistakable, a swift agony of repul¬ 
sion, which his most friendly biographer can only regard with 
a kind of grim satisfaction. For after all there is an amount 
of innocence and absent-mindedness in matters of daily human 
life which is not only niaiserie, but comes very near to moral 
Avrong. In this crowded world a man has no business to Avalk 
about with his eyes always on-the stars. His stumbles may 
have too many consequences, A harsh but a salutary truth. 
If Elsmere noticed it, it was bitterly taught him during a ter¬ 
rible half-hour. When the half-incoherent enigmatical sen¬ 
tences, to which he listened at first Avith a perplexed surprise, 
began gradually to define themselves; Avhen he found a 
Avoman roused and tragicallj" beautiful betAA^een him and escape; 
Avhen no determination on his part not to understand, Avheii 
nothing he could say availed to protect her from herself; 
Avhen they were at last face to face with a confession and an 
appeal which were a disgrace to both—then at last*Elsmere 
paid “ in one minute glad life’s arrears”—the natural penalty 
of an optimism, a boundless faith in human nature, with which 
life, as we know it, is inconsistent. 

How he met the softness, the grace, the seduction of a 
woman who was an expert in all the arts of fascination he 
never kneAV. In memory afterward it Avas all a ghostly mirage 
to him. The low voice, the splendid dress, the scented I’oom 
came back to him, and a confused memory of his own futile 
struggle to ward off Avhat she Avas bent on saying—little else. 
He had been maladroit, he thought, had lost his presence of 
mind. Any man of the world of his acquaintance, he be¬ 
lieved, trampling on himself Avouid have done better. 

But when the softness and the grace were all lost in smart 
humiliation, when the Mine, de Netteville of ordinary life dis¬ 
appeared, and something took her place which was like a coarse 
and malignant underself suddenly brought into the light of 
day—from that point onward, in after-days, he remembered 
it all. 

“. . . '. I know,” cried Eugenie de Netteville at last, stand¬ 
ing at bay before him, her hands locked before her, her white 


574 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


lips quivering, when her cup of shame was full, and her one 
impulse was left to strike the man who had humiliated her— 
‘‘ I know that you and your puritanical wife are miserable— 
miserable. What is the use of denying facts that all the world 
can see, that you have taken pains,” and she laid a fierce, de¬ 
liberate emphasis on each word, “ all the world shall see? There 
—let your wife’s ignorance and bigotry, and jmur own obvious 
relation to her, be my excuse, if I wanted any; but,” and she 
shrugged her white shoulders passionately, “ I want none. I 
am not responsible to your petty codes. Nature and feeling are 
enough for me. I saw you wanting sympathy and atfection—” 
“ My wife ! ” cried Robert, hearing nothing but that one 
word. And then, his glance sweeping over the woman before 
him, he made a stern step forward. 

“ Let me go, iMadame de Netteville, let me go, or I shall 
forget that you_are a woman and I a man, and that in some 
way I can not understand my own blindness and folly—” 
“Must have led to this most undesirable scene,” she said 
with mocking suddenness, throwing herself, however, effectu¬ 
ally in his way. Then a change came over her, and erect, 
ghastly white, with frowning brow and shaking limbs, a baffled 
and smarting woman with whom every restraint had fallen 
away, she let loose upon him a torrent of gall and bitterness 
which he could not have cut short without actual violence. 

He stood proudly enduring it, waiting for the moment 
when what seemed to him an outbreak of mania should have 
spent itself. But suddenly he caught Catherine’s name coupled 
with some contemptuous epithet or other, and his self-control 
failed him. With flashing eyes he went close up to her and 
took her wrists in a grip of iron. 

“You shall not,” he said, beside himself, “you shall not! 
What have I done—what has she done—that you should allow 
yourself such words ? My poor Avife ! ” 

A passionate flood of self-reproachful love Avas on his lips. 
He choked it back. It was a desecration that her name should 
be mentioned in that room. But he dropped the hand he held 
The fierceness died out of his eyes. His companion stood be¬ 
side him panting, breathless, afraid. 

“ Thank God,” he said sloAvly, “ thank God for yourself and 
me that I love my Avife ! I am not Avorthy of her—doubly un¬ 
worthy, since it has been possible for any human being to 
suspect for one instant that I Avas ungrateful for the blessing 
of her love, that I could ever forget and dishonor her ! But 
worthy or not— No !—no matter! Madame de Netteville, 
let me go, and forget that such a person exists.’* 


nOBERT EL8MERE. 


bio 


She looked at him steadily for a moment, at the stern man¬ 
liness of the face which seemed in this half-hour to have grown 
older, at the attitude with its mingled dignity und appeal. In 
that second she realized what she had done and what she had 
forfeited; she measured the gulf between herself and the man 
before her. But she did not flinch. Still holding him, as it 
Av^ere, with menacing, defiant eyes, she moved aside, she Avaved 
her hand with a contemptuous gesture of dismissal. HeboAved, 
passed her, and the door shut. 

For nearly an hour afterward Elsmere Avandered blindly and 
aimlessly through the darkness and silence of the park. 

The sensitive optimist nature Avas all unhinged, felt itself 
Avrestling in the grip of dark, implacable things, upheld by a 
single thread above that moral abyss Avhich yawns beneath us 
all, into which the individual life sinks so easily to ruin and 
nothingness. At such moments a man realizes Avithin himself, 
Avithin the circle of consciousness, the germs of all things 
hideous and vile. “ Save for the grace of Godf he says to 
himself, shuddering, ‘‘ save only for the grace of God—” 

Contempt for himself, loathing for life and its possibilities, 
as he had just beheld them ; moral tumult, pity, remorse, a 
stinging self-reproach—all these things Avrestled Avithin him. 
Wliat, preach to others, and stumble himself into such mire as 
this ? Talk loudly of love and faith, and make it possible all 
the time that a fellow human creature should think you capa¬ 
ble at a pinch of the worst treason against both ? 

Elsmere dived to the very depths of his OAvn soul that night. 
AVas it all the natural consequence of a loosened bond, of a 
Avretched relaxation of effort—a Avretched acquiescence in some¬ 
thing second best ? Had love been cooling ? Had it simply 
ceased to make the trouble love must take to maintain itself ? 
And had this horror been the subtle, inevitable Nemesis ? 

All at once, under the trees of the park, Elsmere stopped 
for a moment in the darkness, apd bared his head, Avith the 
passionate, reverential action of a devotee before his saint. The 
lurid image AAdiich had been pursuing him gave Avay, and in its 
place came the image of a ncAV-made mother, her child close 
within her sheltering arm. Ah ! it was all plain to him noAV. 
The moral tempest had done its work. 

One task of all tasks had been set him from the beginning— 
to keep his Avife’s love ! If she had slipped aAvay from him, to 
the iujury and moral lessening of both, on his coAvardice, on 
his clumsiness, be the blame ! Above all, on his fatal poAver 
of absorbing himself in a hundred outside interests,controversy. 


576 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


literature, society. Even liis work seemed to have lost half its 
sacredness. If there be a canker at the root, no matter how 
large the shoAV of leaf and blossom overhead, there is but the 
more to wither ! Of what worth is any success, but that which 
is grounded deep on the rock of personal love and duty ? 

Oh ! let him go back to her !—wrestle Avith her, open his 
heart again, try new ways, make new concessions. How faint 
the sense of her trial has been growing within him of late! hers 
which had once been more terrible to him than his own ! He 
feels the special temptations of his own nature; he throws liim- 
self, humbled, convicted, at her feet. The Avoman, the scene 
he has left, is effaced, blotted out by the natural intense reac¬ 
tion of remorseful love. 

So he sped homeward at last through the noise of Oxford 
Street, seeing, hearing nothing. He opened his own door, and 
let liimself into the dim, silent house. How the moment re¬ 
called to him that other supreme moment of his life at Mure- 
well ! No liglit in the drawing-room. He went upstairs and 
softly turned the handle of her room door. 

Inside the room seemed to him nearly dark. But the windoAV 
Avas wide open. The free, loosely growing branches of the 
plane-tree made a dark, delicate net-Avork against the lumi¬ 
nous blue of the night. A cool air came to him laden with an 
almost rural scent of earth and leaves. By the Avindow sat a 
Avhite, motionless figure. As he closed the door it rose and 
Avalked toward him Avithout aAvord. Instinctively Robert felt 
that something unknoAvn to him had been passing here. He 
paused breathless, expectant. 

She came to him. She linked her cold trembling fingers 
round his neck. 

“ Robert, I have been Availing so long—it was so late ! I 
thought—” and she choked down a sob—“ perhaps something 
has happened to him, AA^e are separated forever, and I shall 
never be able to tell him. Robert, Mr. Flaxman talked to 
me ; he opened my eyes ^ I have been so cruel to you, so 
hard ! I have broken my voav. I don’t deserve it ; but— 
Robert !—” 

She had spoken Avith extraordinary self-command till the 
last Avord, Avhich fell into a smothered cry for pardon. Cath¬ 
erine Elsmere had very little of the soft clingingness Avhich 
makes the charm of a certain type of Avoman. Each phrase 
she had spoken had seemed to take Avith it a piece of her life. 
She trembled and tottered in her husband’s arms. 

He bent over her Avith half-articulate Avords of amazement, 
of passion. He led her to her chair, and, kneeling before her, 


noiiKIl T L’LSJfERJ^:. 


57 


lie tried, so far as the emotion of both would letliim, to make 
lier realize what was in his own heart, the penitence and long¬ 
ing which had winged his return to her. Witliout a mention 
of Mme. deKetteville’s name, indeed ! That horror she should 
never know. But it was to it, as he held his wife, he owed 
his poignant sense of something half jeopardized and wholly 
recovered ; it was that consciousness in the background of his 
mind, ignorant of it as Catherine was then and always, which 
gave the peculiar epoch-making force to this sacred and critical 
hour of their lives. But she would hear nothing of his self¬ 
blame—nothing. She put her hand across his lips. 

‘‘I have seen things as they are, Robert,” she said, very 
simply ; while I have been sitting here, and downstairs, after 
Mr. Flaxman left me. You were right—I would not under¬ 
stand. And, in a sense, I shall never understand. I can not 
cliange,” and her voice broke into piteousness. “ My Lord is 
my Lord always ; but he is yours, too. Oh, I know it, say 
what 3"OU will! That is what has .been hidden from me ; that 
is what my trouble has taught me ; the powerlessness, the 
worthlessness of words. It is the sjnrit that quickeneth. I 
should never have felt it so but for this fiery furnace of pain. 
But I have been wandering in strange places, through strange 
thoughts. God has not one language, but many. I have 
dared to think he had but one, the one I knew. I have dared ” 
—and she faltered—“ to condemn your faith as no faith. Oh ! 
I lay there so long in the dark downstairs, seeing you by that 
bed; I heard j^our voice, I crept to your side. Jesus was 
there, too. Ah, he was—he was ! Leave me that comfort! 
What are j’-ou saying ? Wrong—3^011 ? LTnkind ? Your wife 
knows nothing of it. Oli, did 3^11 think Avhen you came in 
just now before dinner that I didn’t care, that I had a heart of 
stone ? Did you tliink I had broken m3" solemn promise, my 
vow to you to you the day at Mure well ? So I have a hundred 
times over. I made it in ignorance ; I had not counted the 
cost—how could I ? It was all so new, so strange. I dare 
not make it again, the will is so weak, circumstances so strong. 
But oh ! take me back into 3^0111* life ! Hold me there ! Re¬ 
mind me alwa3"S of this night ; convict me out of my own 
mouth ! But I will learn 1113" lesson ; I will learn to hear the 
two voices, the voice that speaks to 3^011 and the voice that 
speaks to me—I must. It is all plain to me now. It has been 
aj^pointed me.” 

Then she broke down into a kind of weariness, and fell back 
in her chair, her delicate fingers straying with soft, childish 
touch over his hair. 


578 


nOBEUT ELSMEUE. 


“ pjiit I am past tliiiiking. Let us bury it all and begin 
again. ■ Words are notliing.” 

Strange ending to a day of torture ! As she towered above 
bim in the dimness, white and pure and drooping, her force of 
nature all dissolved, lost in this new heavenly weakness of 
love, he thought of the man who passed through the place of 
sin and the place of expiation, and saw at last the rosy light 
creeping along the east, caught the white moving figures, and 
that sweet distant melody rising through the luminous air, 
which announced to him the approach of Beatrice and the 
nearness of those “ shining table-lands whereof our God him¬ 
self is moon and sun.” For eternal life, the ideal state is 
not something future and distant. Dante knew it when he 
talked of “ quellaque imparadisa la mia meyitaP Paradise is 
here, visible and tangible by mortal eyes and hands, whenever 
self is lost in loving, whenever the narrow limits of personalit}^ 
are beaten down by the inrush of the Divine Spirit. 

CHAPTER XLIV. 

The saddest moment in the lives of these two persons whose 
history we have followed for so long was over and done with. 
Henceforward to the end Elsmere and his wife were lovers as 
of old. 

But that day and night left even deeper marks on Robert 
than on Catherine. Afterward she gradually came to feel, 
running all through his views of life, a note sterner, deeper, 
maturer than any present there before. The reasons for it 
were unknown to her, though sometimes her own, tender, ig¬ 
norant remorse supplied them. But they were hidden deep in 
Elsmere’s memory. 

A few days afterward he was casually told that Mme. de 
Hetteville had left England for some time. As a matter of 
fact he never set eyes on her again. After awhile the extrav¬ 
agance of his self-blame abated. He saw things as they were 
—without morbidness. But a certain boyish carelessness of 
mood he never afterward quite recovered. Men and women 
of all classes, and not only among the poor, became more real 
and more tragic—moral truths more awful—to him. It was 
the penalty of a highly strung nature set with exclusive inten¬ 
sity toward certain spiritual ends. 

On the first opportunity after that conversation with Hugh 
Flaxman which had so deeply aifected her, Catherine accom¬ 
panied Elsmere to his Sunday lecture. He tried a little, ten¬ 
derly, to dissuade her. But she went, shrinking and yet de¬ 
termined. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


579 


Slie had not heard him speak in public since that last sermon 
of his in Murevvell Church, every detail of which by long 
brooding had been burned into her mind. The bare Elgood 
Street room, the dingy outlook on the high walls of a ware¬ 
house opposite, the lines of blanched, quick-e^^ed artisans, the 
dissent from what she loved, and he had once loved, implied 
in everything, the lecture itself, on the narratives of the Pas¬ 
sion ; it was all exquisitely painful to her, and, yet, yet she 
was glad to be there. 

Afterward Wardlaw, with the brusque remark to Elsmere 
that “ any fool could see he was getting done up,” insisted on 
taking the children’s class. Catherine, too, had been im¬ 
pressed, as she*saw Robert raised a little above her in the glare 
of many windows, with the sudden perception that the worn, 
exhausted look of the preceding summer had returned upon 
him. She held out her hand to Wardlaw with a quick, warm 
word of thanks. He glanced at her curiousl}". What had 
brought her there, after all ? 

Then Robert, protesting that he was being ridiculously cod¬ 
dled, and that Wardlaw was much more in want of a holiday 
than he, was carried oif to the Embankment, and the two spent 
a happy hour wandering westward, Somerset House, the 
bridges,the Westminster towers rising before them into the haze 
of the June afternoon. A little fresh breeze came olf the 
river ; that, or his wife’s hand on his arm, seemed to put new 
life into Elsmere. And she walked beside him, talked frankly, 
heart to heart, with flashes of her old sweet gayety, as she had 
not talked for months. 

Deep in her m3^stical sense all the time lay the belief in a 
final restoration, in an all-atoning moment, perhaps at the very 
end of life, in which the blind would see, the doubter be con¬ 
vinced. And mean while, the blessedness of this peace, this sur¬ 
render ! Surely the air this afternoon was pure and life-giving 
for them, the bells rang for them, the trees were green for them! 

He had need in the week that followed of all that she had 
given back to him. For Mr. Gre^^’s illness had taken a dan¬ 
gerous and alarming turn. It seemed to be the issue of long 
ill-health, and the doctors feared that there were no resources 
of constitution left to carry him through it. Every day some 
old St. Anselm’s friend on the spot wrote to Elsmere, and with 
each ])ost the news grew more despairing. Since Elsmere had 
left Oxford he could count on the fingers of one hand the oc¬ 
casions on which he and Grey had met face to face. But for 
him, as for many another man of our time, Henry Grey’s in- 


BOBEBT ELBWEBE. 


r>so 

tiiience was not primarily an intiucmcc of personal contact, 
llis mere life, that he was there, on Englisli soil, within a 
measurable distance, had been to Elsrnere in his darkest 
moments one of his thoughts of refuge. At a time when a 
religion which can no longer be believed clashes with a skej)- 
ticism full of danger to conduct, eveiy such witness as Grey 
to the power of a new and coming truths holds a special place 
in the hearts of men who can neither accept fairy tales, nor 
reconcile themselves to a world without faith. The saintl}’’ 
life grows to be a beacon, a witness. Men cling to it as they 
have always clung to each other, to the visible and the tangi¬ 
ble ; as the elders of Miletus, though the Way lay before 
them, clung to the man who had set their feet therein, “ sor¬ 
rowing most of all that they should see his face no more.” 

The accounts grew worse—all friends shut out, no possibility 
of last words—tlie whole of Oxford moved and soi-rowing. 
Then at last, on a Friday, came the dreaded expected letter : 
“ lie is gone ! He died early this morning, without pain, con¬ 
scious almost to the end. He mentioned several friends by 
name, you among them, during the niglit. The funeral is to 
be on Tuesday. You will be here, of course.” 

Sad and memorable day ! By an untoward chance it fell in 
Commemoration week, and Robert found the familiar streets 
teeming with life and noise, under a showeiy, uncertain sky, 
which every now and then Avould send the bevies of lightly- 
gowned maidens, with their mothers and attendant squires, 
skurrying for shelter, and leave the roofs and pavements 
glistening. He walked up to St. Anselm’s—found, as he ex¬ 
pected, that the first part of the service was to be in the chapel, 
the rest in the cemetery, and then mounted the well-known 
staircase to Langham’s rooms. Langham was apparently in 
his bedroom. Lunch was on the table—the familiar commons, 
the familiar toast and water. There, in a recess, were the same 
s))lendid wall maps of Greece he had so often consulted after 
lecture. There was the little case of coins, with the gold 
Alexanders he had handled with so much covetous reverence 
at eighteen. Outside, the irregular quadrangle with its dri])- 
ping trees stretched before him ; the steps of the new Hall, 
now the shower was over, were crowded with gowned figures. It 
might have been yesterdajGhat he had stood in that room blush¬ 
ing with awkward pleasure under Mr. Grey’s salutation. 

The bedroom door was opened and Langham came in. 

“ Elsrnere ! But of course I expected you.” 

His voice seemed to Robert curiously changed. There was 
a llatness in it, an absence of positive cordiality which was 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


681 


new to him in any greeting of Langham’s to himself, and had 
a chilling effect upon him. The face, too, was changed. 
Tint and expression were both dulled ; its marble-like sharp¬ 
ness and finish had coarsened a little, and the figure, which 
had nevCl* possessed the erectness of youth, had now the 
pinched look and the confirmed stoop of the valetudinarian. 

“ I did not write to you, Elsmere,” he said immediately, as 
though in anticipation of what the other would be sure to say: 

knew nothing but what the bulletins said, and I was told 
that Cathcart wrote to you. It is many years now since I 
have seen much of Grey. Sit down and have some lunch. 
We have time, biU not too much time.” 

Robert took a few mouthfuls. Langham was diffident, 
talked disconnectedly of trifles, and Robert was soon pain¬ 
fully conscious that the old s^mipathetic bond between them 
no longer existed. Presently, Langham, as though with an 
effort to remember, asked after Catherine, then inquired wliat 
he was doing in the way of writing, and neither of them 
mentioned the name of Leyburn. They left the table and sat 
S])asmodical]y talking, in reality expectant. And at last the 
sound present already in both minds made itself heard—the 
first long solitary stroke of the chapel bell. 

Robert covered his eyes. 

“ Do you remember in this room, Langham, you introduced 
us first ? ” 

“ I remember,” replied the other abruptly. Then, with a 
half-cynical, half-melancholy scrutiny of his companion, he 
said, after a pause : What a faculty of hero-worship you 
have always had, Elsmere ! ” 

“ Do you know anything of the end?” Robert asked him 
presently, as that tolling bell seemed to bring the strong feel¬ 
ing beneath more irresistibly to the surface. ' 

“No, I never asked,” cried Langham, with sudden harsh 
animation. “ What purpose could be served ? Death should 
be avoided by the living. We have no business with it. Do 
what we will, we can not rehearse our own parts. And the 
sight of other men’s performances helps us no more than the 
sight of a great actor gives the dramatic gift. All they do 
for us is to imperil the little nerve, break through the little 
calm, we have left.” 

Elsmere’s hand dropped, and he turned round to him with a 
flashing smile. 

“Ah—I know it now—you loved him still.” 

Langham, who was standing, looked down on him som¬ 
berly, yet more indulgently. 


582 


llOBblUT ELSMERE. 


“ IIow much you always made of feeling,” he said after a 
little pause, “ in a world where, according to me, our chief 
object should be not to feel.” 

Then he began to hunt for his cap and gown. In another 
minute the two made part of tlie ci’owd in the front quad¬ 
rangle, wliere tlie rain was sprinkling, and the insistent grief¬ 
laden voice of the bell rolled, from pause to pause, above the 
gowned hgures, spreading thence in wide waves of mourning 
sound over Oxford. 

The chapel services passed over Robert like a solemn, 
pathetic dream. 

Tlie lines of undergraduate faces, the provost’s white head, 
tlie voice of the chaplain reading, tlie full male unison of the 
voices replying—how they carried him back to the day when as 
a lad from school he had sat on one of the chancel benches be¬ 
side his mother, listening for the first time to the subtle sim¬ 
plicity, if one may be allowed the paradox, of the provost’s 
preaching ! Just opposite to where he sat now with Langhani, 
Grey had sat that first afternoon ; the freshman’s curious eyes 
had been drawn again and again to the dark, massive head, the 
face Avith its look of reposeful force, of righteous strength. 
During the lesson from Corinthians, Elsmere’s thoughts Avere 
irrelevantly busy with all sorts of mundane memories of the 
dead. What Avas especially present to him Avas a series of Lib¬ 
eral election meetings in Avhich Grey had taken a Avarni part, 
and in which he himself had helped just before he took Orders. 
A hundred odd, incongruous details came back to Robert now 
Avith poignant force. Grey had been to him at one time prim¬ 
arily the professor, the philosopher, the representatiA C of all 
that was best in the life of the university ; now, fresh from 
his OAvn grapple Avith London and its life, what moA’ed him 
most AA^a;^ the memory of the citizen, the friend and brother of 
common man, the thinker Avho had never shirked action in the 
name of thought, for Avhom conduct had been from beginning 
to end the first reality. 

The procession through the streets afterAvard, AAdiich con- 
A'eyed the bodv of this great son of modern Oxford to its last 
resting-place in the citizens’ cemeteiy on the AA'CStern side of 
the tOAvn, will not soon be forgotten, eA^en in a place AAdiich for¬ 
gets notoriously soon. All the university Avas there, all tlie 
tOAvn Avas there. Side by side AAuth men honorably dear to Eng¬ 
land, who had carried Avith them into one or other of the great 
English careers the memory of the teacher, Avere men aa ho had 
knoAvn from day to day the cheery, modest helper in a hun¬ 
dred local causes j side by side Avith the youth of Alma Mater 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


583 


went the poor of Oxford ; tradesnien and artisans followed or 
accompanied the group of gowned and venerable tigiires repre¬ 
senting the heads of houses and the professors, or mingled with 
the slowly ])acing crowd of masters ; while along the route 
groups of visitors and ineriy-makers, young men in flannels or 
girls ill light-<lresses, stood with suddenly grave faces here and 
there, caught by the general wave of mourning, and wonder¬ 
ing what such a spectacle might mean. 

. Robert, losing sight of Langham as they left the chapel, 
found his arm grasped by young Cathcart, his correspondent. 

The man was a junior Fellow who had attached hirnslf to 
Grey during the two*preceding years with especial devotion. 
Robert had only a slight knowledge of him, but there was some¬ 
thing in his voice and grip which made him feel at once in¬ 
finitely more at home with him at this moment than he,had 
felt with the old friend of his undergraduate years. 

They walked down Beaumont Street together. The rain 
came on again, and the long, black crowd stretched before 
them was lashed by the driving gusts. As they went along, 
Cathcart told him all he wanted to know. 

“The night before the end he was perfectly calm and con¬ 
scious. I told you he mentioned your name among the friends 
to whom he sent his good-by. He thought for everybody. For 
all those of his house he left the most minute and tender direc- 
.tions. He forgot nothing. And all with such extraordinary 
simplicity and quietness, like one arranging for a journey ! In 
the evening an old Quaker aunt of his, a north-country woman 
whom he had been much with as a boy, and to whom he was 
much attached, was sitting with him. I was there too. She 
Avas a beautiful old figure in her Avhitecap and kerchief, and it 
seemed to please him to lie and look at her. ‘ It’ll not be for 
long, Heniy,’ she said to him once. ‘ I’m seventy-seven this 
spring. I shall come to you soon.’ He made no reply, and his 
silence seemed to disturb her. I don’t fancy she had known 
much of his mind of late years. “ You’ll not be doubting the 
Lord’s goodness, Henry?’ she said to him, with the tears in 
her eyes. ‘ No,’ he said, ‘ no, never. Only it seems to be his 
will, we should be certain of nothing —but himself! I ask no 
more.’ I shall never forget the accent of those words : they 
were the breath of his inmost life. If ever man was Gottbe- 
tranken it Avas he—and yet not a Avord beAmnd what he felt to 
be true, beyond Avhat the intellect could grasp ! ” 

TAventy minutes later Robert stood by the open grave. The 
rain beat doAvn on the black concourse of mourners. But there 
AA'ere blue spaces in the (,lrifting sky, and a Avavering rainy light 


584 


JlOBmr ELSMERE. 


})layed at intervals over the Wytliam and Iliidcsey ITills, and 
over the buttercnpped river meadows, wliere tlie lush hay- 
grass bent in long lines under the showers. To his left, tlie 
provost, his glistening white head bare to the rain, was reading 
the rest of the service. 

As the coffin was lowered Elsmere bent over the grave. 
friend, my master,” cried the yearning, filial heart, “ oh, give 
me something of yourself to take back into life, something to 
brace me through this darkness of our ignorance, something to 
keep hope alive as you kept it to the end ! ” 

And on the inward ear there rose, with the solemnity of a 
last message, words which years before he had found marked 
in a little book of Meditations boiTowed from Grey’s table— 
words long treasured and often repeated— 

“ Amid a world of forgetfulness and depay, in the sight of 
his own shortcomings and limitations, or on the edge of the 
tomb, he alone who has found his soul in losing it, who in sin¬ 
gleness of mind has lived in order to love and understand, will 
find that the God who is near to him as his own conscience 
has a face of light and love.” 

Pressing the phrases into his memory, he listened to the 
triumphant outbursts of the Christian service. 

“ Man’s hope,” he thought, “has grown humbler than this. 
It keeps now a more modest mien in the presence of the Eter¬ 
nal Mystery ; but is it in truth less real, less sustaining ? Let 
Grey’s trust answer for me.” 

He walked away absorbed, till at last in the little squalid 
street outside the cemetery it occurred to him to look round 
for Langham. Instead, he found Cathcart, who had just come 
up with him. 

“ Is Langham behind ? ” he asked. “ I want a word with 
him before I go.” 

“ Is he here ?” asked the other with a change of exj)ression. 

“But of course ! He was in the chapel. How could you—” 

“ I thought he would probably go away,” said Cathcart with 
some bitterness. “ Grey made many efforts to get him to 
come and see him before he became so desperately "ill. Lang¬ 
ham came once. Grey never asked for him again.” 

“ It is his old horror of expression, I suppose,” said Robert, 
troubled ; “ his dread of being forced to take a line, to face 
anything certain and irrevocable. I understand. He could 
not say good-by to a friend to save his life. Tliere is no 
sliirking that ! One must either do it or leave it ! ” 

Cathcart shrugged his shoulders, and drew a masterl}^ little 
picture of Langham’s life in college. He had succeeded by 


IIOBERT ELSMERE. 


585 


the most adroit devices in completely isolating himself, both 
from the older and the younger men. 

“ He attends college meeting sometimes, and contributes a 
sarcasm or two on the cramming system of the college. lie 
takes a constitutional to Summerton every day on the least fre¬ 
quented side of the road, that he may avoid being spoken to. 
And as to his ways of living, he and I happen to have the same 
scout—old Dobson, you remember ? And if I would let him, he 
would tell me tales b}^ the hour. He is the only man in the 
university who knows anything about it. I gather from what 
he saj's that Langham js becoming a complete valetudinarian. 
Eveiything must go exactly by rule—his food, his work, the 
inanagement of his clothes—and any little contretemps makes 
him ill. But the comedy is to watch him when there is any¬ 
thing going on in the place that he thinks maj^ lead to a can¬ 
vass and to any attempt to influence him for a vote. On these 
occasions he goes off with automatic regularity to a hotel at 
West Malvern, and only reappears when the Times tells him 
the thing is done with.” 

Both laughed. Then Robert sighed. Weaknesses of Lang- 
hani’s sort may be amusing enough to the contemptuous and 
unconcerned outsider. But the general result of them, whether 
for the man himself or those whom he affects, is tragic, not 
comic ; and Elsrnere had good reasons for knowing it. 

Later, after a long talk Avith the provost, and meetings with 
various other old friends, he walked down to the station, under 
a sky clear from rain, and through a tOAvn gay with festal prej)- 
arations. Not a sign now, in these crowded, bustling streets, 
of that rnelanchol}^ pageant of the afternoon. The heroic mem¬ 
ory had flashed for a moment like something vhdd and gleam¬ 
ing in the sight of all, understanding and ignorant. Now it 
lay committed to a few faithful hearts, there to become one 
seed among many of a new religiousyife in England. 

On the platform Robert found himself nervously accosted 
by a tall, shabbily-dressed man. 

Elsmere, hai’e you forgotten me ? ” 

He turned and recognized a man whom he had last seen as 
a St. Anselm’s utidergraduate—One MacNiell, a handsome 
rowdy, young Irishman, supposed to be clever, and decidedly 
I })opular in the college. As he stood looking at him, puzzled by 
I the difference between the old impression and the new, sud- 
' denly the man’s story flashed across him ; he remembered 
some disgraceful escapade—an expulsion. 

“ You came for the funeral, of course ? ” said the other, his 
face flushing coTisciously. 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


o8G 


“ Yes—and you too ? ” 

The man turned away, and something in his silence led Rob¬ 
ert to stroll on beside him to the open end of the platform. 

‘‘ I have lost my only friend,” MacNiell said at last, hoarse¬ 
ly. “ He took me up when my own father would have noth¬ 
ing to say to me. He found me work ; he wrote to me ; for 
years he stood between me and perdition. I am just going out 
to a post in New Zealand he got for me, and next week, before 
I sail—I—I—am to be married—he was to be there. He was 
so pleased—he had seen her.” 

It was one story out of a hundred like it, as Robert knew 
very well. They talked for a few minutes, then the train 
loomed in the distance. 

“ He saved you,” said Robert, holding out his hand, ‘‘ and 
at a dark moment in my own life I owed him everything. 
There is nothing we can do for him in return but—to remember 
him ! Write to me, if you can or will, from New Zealand, 
for his sake.” 

A few seconds later the train sped past the bare little ceme¬ 
tery, which lay just beyond the line. Robert bent forward. 
In the yellow glow of the evening he could distinguish the 
grave, the mound of gravel, the plans, and some figures mov¬ 
ing beside it. He strained his eyes till he could see no more, 
his heart full of veneration, of memory, of prayer. In himself 
life seemed so restless and combative. Surely he, more than 
others, had need of the lofty lessons of death ! 

CHAPTER XLV. 

In the weeks which followed—weeks often of mental and 
physical depression, caused by his sense of personal loss and by 
the influence of an overworked state he could not be got to 
admit—Elsmere owed much to Hugh Flaxman’s cheery, sjun- 
pathetic temper, and became more attached to him than ever, 
and more ready than ever, should the fates deem it so, to wel¬ 
come him as a brother-in-law. However, the fates for the mo¬ 
ment seemed to have borrowed a leaf from Langham’s book, 
and did not apparently know their own minds. It says vol¬ 
umes for Hugh Flaxman’s general capacities as a human being 
that at this period he should have had any attention to give to 
a friend, his position as a lover was so dubious and difficult. 

After the evening at the Workmen’s Club, and as a result of 
further meditation, he had had greatl}^ developed the tactics 
first adopted on that occasion. He had beaten a masterly re¬ 
treat, and Rose Leyburn was troubled with him no more. 

The result was that a certain brilliant young person was 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


587 


soon sharply conscious of a sudden drop in the pleasures of 
living. Mr. Flaxinan had been the Leyburn’s most constant 
and entertaining visitor. During the whole of May he paid 
one formal call in Lerwick Gardens and was then entertained 
tete-d-tete by Mrs. Leyburn, to Rose’s intense subsequent 
annoyance, who knew perfectly well that her mother was in¬ 
capable of chattering about anything but her daughters. 

He still sent flowers, but they came from his head gardener, 
addressed to Mrs. Leyburn. Agnes put them in water ; and 
Rose never gave them a look. Rose went to Lady Helen’s be¬ 
cause Lady Helen made her, and was much too engaging a 
creature to be rebuffed ; but, however merry and protracted 
the teas in those scented rooms might be, Mr. Flaxman’s step 
on the stairs, and Flaxman’s hands on the curtain over the 
door, till now the feature in the entertainment most to be 
counted on, were, generally speaking, conspicuously absent. 

He and the Le3^burns met, of course ; for their list of com¬ 
mon friends was now considerable ; but Agnes, reporting mat¬ 
ters to Catherine, could only say that each of these occasions 
left Rose more irritable, and more inclined to say biting things 
as to the foolish ways in which society takes its pleasures. 

Rose certainly was irritable, and at times, Agnes thought, 
depressed. But as usual she was unapproachable about her 
own affairs, and the state of her mind could only be somewhat 
dolefully gathered from the fact that she was much less unwill¬ 
ing to go back to Bur wood this summer than had ever been 
known before. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman left certain other people in no 
doubt as to his intentions. 

“ My dear aunt,” he said calmly to Lady Charlotte, “ I mean 
to marry Miss Leyburn if I can at any time persuade her to 
have me. So much 3^011 may take as fixed, and it will be quite 
waste of breath on your part to quote dukes to me. But the 
other factor in the problem is by no means fixed. Miss Le3^- 
burn won’t have me for the present, and as for the future I 
have most salutaiy qualms.” 

“ Hugh ! ” interrupted Lady Charlotte, angril3^, “as if you 
hadn’t the mothers of London at 3^0111* feet for years ! ” 

Lady Charlotte was in a most variable frame of mind ; one 
day hoping devoutly that the Langham affair might prove 
lasting enough in its effects to tire Hugh out ; the next, out¬ 
raged that a silly girl should waste a thought on such a crea¬ 
ture, while Hugh was in her way ; at one time angry that an 
insignificant chit of a school-master’s daughter should appar¬ 
ently care so little to be the Duke of Sedbergh’s niece, and 


588 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


should even dare to allow herself the luxury of snubbing a 
Flaxmau ; at another, utter skeptical as to any lasting ob¬ 
duracy oil the chit’s part. The girl was clearly anxious not to 
fall too easily, but as to final refusal—pshaw ! And it made 
her mad that Hugh would hold himself so cheap. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxrnan felt himself in no way called upon 
to answer that remark of his aunt’s we have recorded. 

“ I have qualms,” he repeated, “ but I mean to do all I 
know, and you and Helen must help me.” 

Lady Charlotte crossed her hands before her. 

“ I may be a Liberal and a lion-hunter,” she said firmly, 
“ but I have still conscience enough left not to aid and abet 
my nephew in throwing himself away.” 

She had nearly slipped in “ again ”; but just saved herself. 

“ Your conscience is all a matter of the duke,” he told her. 
“ AYell, if you won’t help me, then Plelen and I will have to 
arrange it ourselves.” 

But this did not suit Lady Charlotte at all. She had alwaj^s 
played the part of earthly providence to this particular nephew, 
and it was abominable to her that the wretch, having refused 
for ten years to provide her Avith a love-affair to manage, 
should now manage one for himself in spite of her. 

“ You are such an arbitrary creature ! ” she said fretfully ; 

you prance about the world like Don Quixote, and expect 
me to pla}^ Sancho Avithout a murmur.” 

“ PIoAV many drubbings have I brought j^ou yet ? ” he asked 
her, laughing. He Avas really A^ery fond of her. “ It is true 
there is a point of likeness; I AA^on’t take your advice. But then 
why don’t you give me better ? It is strange,” he added, mus¬ 
ing ; “ women talk to us about love as if Ave Avere too gross to 
understand it; and Avhen they come to business, and thej^’re 
not in it themselves, they shoAV the temper of attorneys.” 

“ Love ! ” cried Lady Charlotte, nettled. “ Do you mean 
to tell me, Hugh, that you are really, seriously in loA^e with 
that girl ? ” 

‘‘Well, I only knoAAq” he said, thrusting his hands far into 
his pockets, “ that unless things mend I shall go out to Cali¬ 
fornia in the autumn and try ranching.” 

Lady Charlotte burst into an angry laugh. He stood oppo¬ 
site to her, Avith his orchid in his buttonhole, himself the fine 
flower of civilization. Ranching, indeed ! IIoAvever, he had 
done so many odd things in his life, that, as she kneAV, it was 
never quite safe to decline to take him seriously, and he looked 
at her now so defiantly, his clear, greenish eyes so wide open and 
alert, that her A\dll began to Avaver under the pressure of his, 


ROBmr BLSMRRE. 


589 


“ What do j^ou want me to do, sir ? ” 

His glance relaxed at once, and he laughingly explained to 
her that what he asked of her was to keej) the pre}^ in sight* 

“ I can do nothing for myself at present,” he said : “ I get 
on her nerves. She was in love with that hlack-haired ey^fant 
du si^cle —or rather, she prefers to assume that she was—and I 
haven’t given her time to forget him. A serious blunder, and 
I deserve to sulfer for it. Very well, then, I retire, and I ask 
you and Helen to keep watch. Don’t let her go. Make your¬ 
selves nice to her ; and, in fact, spoil me a little now I am 
on the high-road to forty, as you used to spoil me at four¬ 
teen.” 

Mr. Flaxman sat down by his aunt and kissed her hand, after 
which Lady Charlotte was as wax before him. Thank 
Heaven,” she reflected, “ in ten days the duke and all of thejn 
go out of town.” Retribution, therefore, for wrong-doing 
would be tardy, if wrong-doing there must be. She could but 
ruefully reflect that after all the girl was beautiful and gifted; 
moreover, if Hugh would force her to befriend him in this 
criminality, there might be a certain joy in thereby vindica¬ 
ting those Liberal principles of hers, in which a scornful family 
liad always refused to believe. So, being driven into it, she 
would fain have done it boldly and with a dash. But she 
could not rid her mind of the duke, and her performance all 
through, as a matter of fact, was blundering. 

However, she was for the time very gracious to Rose, being 
in truth really fond of her ; and Rose, however high she might 
hold her little head, could find no excuse for quarreling either 
with her or Lady Helen. 

Toward the middle of June there was a grand ball given by 
Lady Fauntleroy at Fauntleroy House, to which the two Miss 
Leyburns, by Lady Helen’s machinations, were invited. It was 
to be one of the events of the season, and when the cards 
arrived “ to have the honor of meeting their royal highnesses,” 
etc., etc., Mrs. Leyburn, good soul, gazed at them with eyes 
which grew a little moist under her spectacles. She wished 
Richard could have seen the girls dressed, just once.” But 
Rose treated the cards with no sort of tenderness. “ If one 
could but put them up to auction,” she said flippantly, holding 
them up, “how many German o^^era tickets I should get lor 
nothing ! I don’t know what Agnes feels. As for me I have 
neither nerve enough for the people, nor money enough 
for the toilet.” 

However, with eleven o’clock Lady Helen ran in, a fresh 
vision of blue and white, to suggest certain dresses for tin* 


590 


ROBERT EL8MERE, 


sisters, wliich had occurred to lier in tlie visions of the night, 
‘‘original, adorable—cost, a mere nothing ! ” 

“ My harpy,” she remarked, alluding to her dressmaker, 
“ would ruin you over them, of course. Your maid”—the 
Leyburns possessed a remarkably clever one—“ will make 
them divinely for twopence-half-penny. Listen.” 

Rose listened ; her eye kindled ; the maid was summoned ; 
and the invitation accepted in Agnes’s neatest hand. Even 
Catherine was roused during the following ten days to a smil¬ 
ing, indulgent interest in the concerns of the work-room. 

The evening came, and Lad}^ Helen fetched the sisters in her 
carriage. The ball was a magniticent alfair. The house was 
one of historical interest and importance, and all that the inge¬ 
nuity of the present could do to give fresh life and gayety to the 
piUared rooms, the carved galleries and stately staircases of the 
past, had been done. The ball-room, lined with Yandycks and 
Lelys, glowed softly with electric light ; the picture-gallery had 
been banked with flowers and carpeted with red, and the beau¬ 
tiful dresses of the women trailed up and down it, challenging 
the satins of the Netschers and the Terburgs on the walls. 

Rose’s card was soon full to overflowing. The young men 
present were of the smartest, and would not willingly have 
bowed the knee to a nobody, however pretty. But Lad}^ Helen’s 
devotion, the girl’s reputation as a musician, and her little 
nonchalant, disdainful ways, gave her a kind of prestige, 
which made her, for the time being at any rate, the equal of 
anybody. ' Petitioners came and went away empty. Royalt}?' 
was introduced, and smiled both upon the beauty and the 
beauty’s delicate and becoming dress ; and still Rose, though a 
good deal more flushed and erect than usual, and though flesh 
and blood could not resist the contagious pleasure which glis¬ 
tened even in the eyes of that sage Agnes, was more than 
half-inclined to say, with the preacher, that all was vanity. 

Presently, as she stood waiting with her hand on her part¬ 
ner’s arm before gliding into a waltz, she saw Mr. Flaxman 
opposite to her, and with him a young debutante in white 
tulle—a thin, pretty undeveloped creature, whose sharp elbows 
and timid movements, together with the blushing enjoyment 
glowing so frankly from her face, pointed her out as the school¬ 
girl of sweet seventeen, just emancipated, and trying her 
wings. 

“ Ah, there is Lady Florence ! ” said her partner, a hand¬ 
some young hussar. “ This ball is in her honor, you know. 
She comes out to-night. AYhat, another cousin ? Really she 
keeps too much in the family ! ” 


nOBERT ELSMERE. 


591 


Is Mr. Flaxmaii a cousin ? ” 

The young man replied that he was, and then, in tlie inter¬ 
vals of waltzing, went on to explain to her the relationships 
of many of the people present, till the whole gorgeous affair 
began to seem to Rose a mere family party. Mr. Flaxman 
was of it. She was not. 

I “ Why am I here ? ” the little Jacobin said to herself fiercely, 
^ as she waltzed ; “ it is foolish, unprofitable. I do not belong 
to them, nor them to me ! ” 

‘‘ Miss Leyburn ! charmed to see you ! ” cried Lady Char¬ 
lotte, stopping her ; and then in a loud whisper in her ear, 
“ Never saw you look better. Your taste, or Helen’s, that 
dress ? The roses—exquisite ! ” 

Rose dropped her little mock courtesy and whirled on 
again. 

Lady Florences are always well dressed,” thought the 
child angrily ; “ and who notices it ? ” 

Another turn brought them against Mr. Flaxman and his 
partner. Mr. Flaxman came at once to greet her with smil¬ 
ing courtesy. 

“ I have a Cambridge friend to introduce to you—a beau¬ 
tiful youth. Shall I find you by Helen ? Now, Lady Florence, 
patience a moment. That corner is too crowded. How good 
tliat last turn was ! ” 

And bending with a sort of kind chivalry over his partner, 
who looked at him with the eyes of a joyous, excited child, he 
led her away. Five minutes later Rose, standing flushed by 
Lady Helen, saw liim coming again toward her, ushering a tall, 
blue-eyed youth, whom he introduced to her as Lord AYayn- 
flete.” The handsome boy looked at her with a boy’s open ad¬ 
miration, and beguiled her of a supper dance, while a group 
standing near, a mother and three daughters, stood watching 
with cold eyes and expressions which said plainly to the initi¬ 
ated that mere beauty was receiving a ridiculous amount of 
attention. 

“ I wouldn’t have given it him, but it is rude —it is had man¬ 
ners^ not even to ask ! ” the supposed victress was saying to 
herself with quivering lips, her eyes following not the Trinity 
freshman, who was their latest captive, but an older man’s well- 
knit figure, and a head on which the fair hair was already 
growing scanty, receding a little from the fine, intellectual 
brows. 

An hour later she was again standing by Lady Helen, wait¬ 
ing for a partner, when she saw two persons crossing the 
room, which was just beginning to fill again for dancing, to- 


592 


ROBERT ELSMEEE. 


ward them. One wa« Mr. Flaxman, the other was a small, 
wrinkled old man, who leaned upon his arm, displaying the 
ribbon of the Garter as he walked. 

“ Dear me,” said Lady Helen, a little fluttered, “here is ray 
uncle Sedbergh. I thought they had left town.” 

The pair approached, and the old duke bowed over his niece’s 
liand with the manners of a past generation. 

“ I made Hugh give me an arm,” he said quaveringly. 
“ These floors are homicidal. If I come down on them I shall 
bring an action.” 

“ I thought you had all left town ? ” said Lady Helen. 

“ Who can make plans with a government in power pledged 
to every sort of villainy and public plunder ? ” said the old 
man testily. “ I suppose Yarley’s there to-night, helping to 
vote away my property and Fauntleroy’s.” 

“ Some of his own, too, if you please ? ” said Lady Helen, 
smiling. “ Yes, I suppose he is waiting for the division, or he 
would be here.” 

“ I wonder why Providence blessed me with such a Radical 
crew of relations ? ” remarked the duke. “ Hugh is a regular 
Communist. I never heard such ai’guments in my life. And 
as for any idea of standing by his order—” The old man shook 
his bald head and shrugged his small shoulders with almost 
French vivacity. lie had been handsome once, and delicately 
featured, but now the left eye drooped, and the face had a 
strong look of peevishness and ill-health. 

“ Uncle,” interposed Lady Helen, “ let me introduce you to 
my two great friends. Miss Leyburn, Miss Rose Leyburn.” 

The duke bowed, looked at them through a pair of sharp 
eyes, seemed to cogitate inwardly whether such a name had 
ever been known to him, and turned to his nephew. 

“ Get me out of this, Hugh, and I shall be obliged to 
you. Young people may risk it, but if I broke I shouldn’t 
mend.” 

And still grumbling audibly about the floor, he hobbled off 
toward the picture-gallery. Mr. Flaxman had only time for a 
smiling backward glance at Rose. 

“ Have you given ray pretty boy a dance ? ” 

“Yes,” slie said, but with as much stiffness as she might 
have shown to his uncle. 

“ That’s over,” said Lady Helen with relief. “ My uncle 
liardly meets any of us now without a spar. He has never for¬ 
given my father for going over to the Liberals. And then he 
thinks we none of us consult him enough. No more we do— 
except Aunt Charlotte. She'^s afraid of him ! ” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


593 


‘‘ Lady Charlotte afraid ! ” echoed Rose. 

“ Odd, isn’t it ? The duke avenges a good many victims on 
her, if they only knew ! ” 

Lady Helen was called away, and Rose was left standing, 
wondering what had happened to her partner. 

Opposite, Mr. Flaxman was pushing through a doorway, 
and Lady Florence was again on his arm. At the same time 
she became conscious of a morsel of chaperons’ conversation 
such as, by the kind contrivances of fate, a girl is tolerably 
sure to hear under similar circumstances. 

The debutanie’s good looks, Hugh Flaxman’s apparent sus¬ 
ceptibility to them, the possibility of results, and the satisfac¬ 
tory disposition of the family goods and chattels that would be 
brought about by such a match, the opportunity it would offer 
the man, too, of rehabilitating himself socially after his first 
matrimonial escapade—Rose caught fragments of all these 
topics as they were discussed by two old ladies, presumably 
also of the family “ ring,” who gossiped behind her with more 
gusto than discretion. Highmindedness, of course, told her 
to move away ; something else held her fast, till her partner 
came up for her. 

Then she floated away into the whirlwind of waltzers. But 
as she moved round the room on her partner’s arm, her deli¬ 
cate, half-scornful grace attracting look after look, the soul 
within was all aflame—aflame against the serried ranks and 
phalanxes of this unfamiliar, hostile world ! She had just been 
reading Trevelyan’s Life of Fox” aloud to her mother, who 
liked occasionally to flavor her knitting with literature, and 
she began now to revolve a passage from it, describing the 
upper class of the last centuiy, which had struck that morning 
on her quick, retentive memory : “ ‘ A few thousand people 
who thought that the world was made for them ’—did it not 
run so ?—‘and that all outside their own fraternity were un¬ 
worthy of notice or criticism, bestowed upon each other an 
amount of attention quite inconceivable. . . . Within the 
charmed precincts there prevailed an easy and natural mode of 
intercourse, in some respects singularly delightful.’ Such, for 
instance, as the Duke of Sedburgh was master of ! Well, it 
was worth while, perhaps, to have gained an experience even 
at the expense of certain illusions, as to the manners of dukes, 
and—and—as to the constancy of friends. But never again— 
never again ! ” said the impetuous inner voice. “ I have my 
world—they theirs ! ” 

But why so strong a flood of bitterness against our poor 
upper class, so well intentioned for all its occasional lack of 


594 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


lucidity, should have arisen in so young a breast it is a little 
difficult for the most conscientious biographer to exj)lain. Slie 
had partners to her heart’s desire; Young Lord Wayntiete 
used liis utmost arts upon her to persuade her that at least 
half a dozen numbers of the regular programme were extras 
and therefore at his disposal; and when royalty sup2:)ed, it was 
graciously pleased to ordain that Lady Helen and her two 
companions should sup behind the same folding-doors as itself, 
while be^^ond these doors surged the inferior crowd of persons 
who had been specially invited to “meet their royal high¬ 
nesses,” and had so far been held worthy neitlier to dance nor 
to eat in the same room with them. But in vain. Rose still 
felt herself, for all her laughing outward insouciance^ a poor, 
bruised, helpless chattel, trodden under the heel of a world 
which was tolerably powerful, rich, and self-satistied, the 
odious product of “family arrangements.” 

Mr. Flaxman sat far awa}" at the same royal table as herself. 
Beside him was the tall, thin debutante. “She is like one of 
the Gajnsborough pi-incesses,” thought Rose, stiuRdng her with 
involuntary admiration. “ Of course it is all plain. He will 
get everything he wants, and a Lady Florence into the bar¬ 
gain. Radical, indeed ! What nonsense ! ” 

Then it startled her to find that the eyes of Lady Florence’s 
neighbor were, as it seemed, on herself; or was he merely nod¬ 
ding to Lady Helen ?—and she began immediately to give a 
smiling attention to the man on her left. 

An hour later she and Agnes and Lady Helen were descend¬ 
ing the great staircase on their way to their carriage. The 
morning light was flooding through the chinks of the carefully 
veiled windows ; Lady Helen was yawning behind her tinj" 
white hand, her eyes nearly asleep. But the two sisters, who 
had not been up till three, on four preceding nights, like their 
chaperon, were still almost as fresh as the flowers massed in 
the hall below. 

“ Ah, there is Hugh ! ” cried Lady Helen. “ How I hope 
he has found the carriage ! ” 

At that moment Rose slipped on a spray of gardenia, which 
had dropped from the bouquet of some predecessor. To pre¬ 
vent herself from falling downstairs, she caught hold of the 
stem of a brazen chandelier fixed in the balustrade. It saved 
her, but she gave her arm a most painful wrench, and leaned, 
limp and white, against she railing of the stairs. Lady Helen 
turned at Agnes’s exclamation, but before she could speak, as 
it seemed, IMr. Flaxman, who had been standing talking just 
behind them, was on the stairs. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


• 595 


“You liave hurt your arm ? Don’t speak—take mine. Let 
me get you downstairs out of the crusli.” 

She was too far gone to resist, but when she was mistress 
of lierself again she found herself in the libraiiy with some 
water in her hand which Mr. Flaxman had just put there. 

“Is it the ])laying hand?” said Lady Helen anxiously. 

“No,” said Rose, trying to laugh ; “the bowing elbow.” 
And she raised it, with a contortion of pain. 

“ Don’t raise it,” he said peremptorily. “ We will have a 
doctor here in a moment, and have it bandaged.” 

He disappeared. Rose tried to sit up, seized with a frantic 
longing to disobey him, and get off before he returned. 
Stinging the girl’s mind was the sense that it might all per¬ 
fectly well seem to him a planned appeal to his pity. 

“ Agnes, help me up,” she said, with a little involuntary 
groan ; “ I shall be better at home.” 

But both Lady Helen and Agnes laughed her to scorn, and 
she lay back once more overwhelmed by fatigue and faintness. 
A few more minutes, and a doctor appeared, caught by good 
luck in the next street. He pronounced it a severe muscular 
strain, but nothing more ; applied a lotion and improvised a 
sling. Rose consulted him anxiously as to the interference 
Avith her playing. 

“ A week,” he said ; “ no more, if you are careful.” 

Her pale face brightened. Her art had seemed specially 
dear to her of late. 

“ Hugh ! ” called Lady Helen, going to the door. “ N'o^o 
we are ready for the carriage.” 

Rose, leaning on Agnes, walked out into the hall. They 
found him there waiting. 

“ The carriage is here,” he said, bending toward her with 
a look and tone which so stirred the fluttered nerves that 
the sense of faintness stole back upon her. “ Let me take you 
to it.” 

“Thank you,” she said, coldly, but by a superhuman effort; 
“ my sister’s help is quite enough.” 

lie folloAved them with Lady Helen. At the carriage door the 
sisters hesitated a moment. Rose Avas helpless without a right 
hand. A little imperative movement from behind displaced 
Agnes, and Rose felt herself hoisted in by a strong arm. She 
sank into the further corner. The glow of the dawn caught 
her white delicate features, the curls on her temples, all the 
silken confusion of her dress. Hugh Flaxman put in Agnes and 
his sister, said something to Agnes about coming to inquire, 
and raised his hat. Rose caught the quick force and intensity 


696 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


of Ills eyes, and then closed her own, lost in a languid swoon of 
pain, memory, and resentful wonder, 

Flaxman walked awa}^ down Park Lane through the chill 
morning quiet*iess, the gathering light striking over the houses 
beside him on the misty stretches of the park. His hat was 
over his eyes, his hands thrust into his pockets ; a close observer 
wmuld have noticed a certain trembling of the lips. It was but 
a few seconds since lie young w’arni beauty had been for an in¬ 
stant in his arms ; his wdiole being was shaken by it, and by 
that last look of hers. “ Have I gone too far ?” he asked him¬ 
self, anxiously. “ Is it divinely true— already —that she resents 
being left to herself ? Oh, little rebel ! You tried your best not 
to let me see. But you were angry, you w^ere ! Now, then, how 
to proceed ? She is all tire, all character ; I rejoice in it. She 
will give me trouble ; so much the better. Poor little hurt 
thing ! the fight is only beginning ; but I will make her do 
penance some day for all that loftiness to-night.” 

If tliese reflections betray to the reader a certain masterful 
note of confidence in Mr. Flaxman’s mind, he will perhaps find 
small cause to regret that Rose did give him a great deal of 
trouble. 

Nothing could have been more salutary,” to use his oavm 
word, than the dance she led him during the next three wrecks. 
She provoked him indeed at moments so much that he was a 
hundred times on the point of trying to seize his kingdom of 
heaven by violence, of throwing lumself upon her wdth a tem¬ 
pest shock of reproach and appeal. But some secret instinct 
restrained him. She w\as wdllful, she was capricious ; she had 
a real and pow^erful distraction in her art. He must be patient 
and risk nothing. 

He suspected, too, what was the truth—that Lady Cliarlotte 
was doing harm. Rose, indeed, had grown so touchih" sensitive 
4;hat she found offense in almost every w^ord of Lady Charlotte’s 
about her nephews Why should the apparently casual remarks 
of the aunt bear so constantly on the subject of the nephew’s 
social importance ? Rose vowed to herself that she needed no 
reminder of that station wdiereunto it had pleased God to call 
her, and that Lady Charlotte might spare herself all those anx¬ 
ieties and reluctances which the girl’s quick sense detected, in 
spite of the invitations so freely showered on Lerwdck Gardens. 

The end of it all was that Hugh Ftaxman found himself again 
driven into a corner. At the bottom of him w^as still a confi¬ 
dence that w^ould not yield. \Yas it possible that he had ever 
given her some tiny, involuntary glimpse of it, and that but 
for that glimpse she w^ould have let him make his peace mudi 


konEur Kisumw. 597 

more easily ? At any rate, now he felt himself at the end of 
his resources. 

“I must change the venue,” he said to himself ; “ decidedly 
I must change the venue.” 

So by the end of June he had accepted an invitation to fish 
in Norway with a friend, and was gone. Rose received the 
news with a callousness which made even Lady Helen want to 
shake her. 

On the eve of his journey, however, Hugh Flaxman had at 
last confessed himself to Catherine and Robert. His obvious 
plight made any further scruples on their part futile, and what 
they had they gave liim in the way of sympathy. Also Robert, 
gathering that he already knew much, and without betraying 
any confidence of Rose’s, gave him a hint or two on the sub¬ 
ject of Langham. But more not the friendliest mortal could 
do for him, and Flaxman went off into exile announcing to a 
mocking Elsmere that he should sit pensive on the banks of 
Norwegian rivers till fortune had had time to change. 


BOOK VII.— GAIN AND LOSS. 

CHAPTER XLVI. 

A HOT July had well begun, but still Elsmere was toiling on 
in Elgood Street, and could not persuade himself to think of a 
holiday. Catherine and the child he had driven away more 
than once, but the claims upon himself were becoming so ab¬ 
sorbing he did not know how to go even for a fcAV weeks. There 
were certain individuals in particular who depended on him 
from day to day. One was Charles Richards’s widow. The poor, 
desperate creature had put herself abjectly into Elsmere’s 
hands. He had sent her to an asylum, where she had been 
kindly and skillfully treated, and after six weeks’ abstinence 
she had just returned to her children, and was being watched 
by himself and a competent woman neighbor, whom he had 
succeeded in interesting in the case. 

Another was a young “secret springer,” to use the mysteri¬ 
ous terms of the trade—Robson by name—whom Elsmere had 
originally known as a clever Avorkman belonging to the Avatch- 
making colony, and a diligent attendant from the beginning on 
the Sunday lectures. He was now too ill to leave his lodgings,' 
and his sickly pessimist personality had established a special 
hold on Robert. He Avas dA'ing of tnrnor in the throat, and had 
become a torment to himself and a disgust to others. There was 



598 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


a spark of wayward genius in liim, liowever, wliich enabled 
liiin to Hear liis ills with a mixture of savage humor and clear¬ 
eyed despair. In general outlook he was much akin to tlie au¬ 
thor of the “ Cit}^ of Dreadful Night,” whose poems he read ; 
the loathsome spectacles of London had filled him with a kind 
of somber energy of revolt against all that is. And now that 
he could only Avork intermittently, he Avould sit brooding for 
hours, startling the fellow-workmen Avho came in to see him 
with ghastly Heine-like jokes on his own hideous disease, liv¬ 
ing no one exactly knew how, though it was supposed on sup¬ 
plies sent him by a shop-keeper uncle in the country, and con¬ 
stantly on the verge, as all his acquaintances felt, of some 
ingenious expedient or other for putting an end to himself and 
his troubles. He Avas unmarried, and a misogynist to boot. 
No Avoman Avillingly Avent near him, and he tended himself. 
How Robert had gained any hold upon him no one could guess. 
Rut from the moment when Elsmere, struck in the lecture-room 
by the pallid, ugly face and SAvathed neck, began regularly to 
go and see him, the elder man felt instinctively that virtue had 
gone out of him, and that in some subtle Avay yet another life 
had become pitiLilly, silently dependent on his OAvn stock of 
strength and comfort. 

His lecturing and teaching AA^ork also was becoming more and 
more the instrument of far-reaching change, and therefore 
more and more difficult to leave. The thoughts of God, the 
image of Jesus, which were active and fruitful in his OAvn mind, 
had been gradually passing from one into the many, and Rob¬ 
ert Avatched the sacred transforming emotion, once nurtured at 
his OAvn heart, now Avorking among the croAAwl of men and 
Avomen his fiery speech had gathered round him, Avith a trem¬ 
bling joy, an humble prostration of the soul before the Eternal 
Truth, no Avords can fitly describe. With an ever-increasing 
detachment of mind from the objects of self and sense, he felt 
himself a tool in the Great Workman’s hand. “Accomplish 
thy purposes in me,” Avas the cry of his Avhole heart and life ; 
“ use me to the utmost ; spend every faculty I have, O ‘ Thou 
Avho moldest men ! ’ ” 

But in the end his Avork itself drove him aAvay. A certain 
memorable Saturday evening brought it about. It had been 
his custom of late to sj)end an occasional evening hour after his 

night-school Avork in the North R-Club, of Avhich he Avas 

now by invitation a member. Here, in one of the inner rooms, 
he Avould stand against the mantel-piece chatting, smoking 
often Avitli the men. Everything came up in turn to be dis¬ 
cussed ; and Robert Avas at least as ready to learn from the 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 


599 


practical workers about him as to teach. But in general these 
informal talks and debates became the supplement of tlie Sun- 
da}^ lectures. Here he met Andrews and the Secularist crew 
face to face ; here he grappled in Socratic fashion with objec¬ 
tions and difficulties, throwing into the task all his charm and 
all his knowledge, a man at once of no pretensions, and of un¬ 
failing natural dignity. Nothing, so far, had served his cause 
and his influence so well as these moments of free discursive 
intercourse. The mere orator, the mere talker, indeed, would 
never have gained any permanent hold ; but the life behind 
gave weight to every acute or eloquent word, and importance 
even in those sallies of a boyish enthasiasm which were still 
common enough with him. 

He had already visited the club once during the week pre¬ 
ceding this Saturday. On both occasions there was much talk 
of the growiTig popularity and efficiency of the Elgood Street 
work, of the numbers attending the lectures, the story-telling, 
the Sunday-school, and of the way in which the attractions of 
it had spread into other quarters of the parish, exciting there, 
especially among the clergy of St. Wilfrid’s, an anxious and 
critical attention. The conversation on Saturday night, how¬ 
ever, took a turn of its own. Robert felt in it a new and curi¬ 
ous note of responsibility. The men present were evidently 
beginning to regard the work as their work also, and its suc¬ 
cess as their interest. It was perfectly natural, for not only 
had most of them been his supporters and hearers from the 
beginning, but some of them were now actually teaching in 
the night-school or helping in the various branches of tlie 
large and overflowing boys’ club. He listened to them for 
a while in his favorite attitude, leaning against the mantel¬ 
piece, throwing in a word or two now and then as to how 
this or that part of the work might be amended or expanded. 
Then suddenly a kind of inspiration seemed to pass from them 
to him. Bending forward as the talk dropped a moment, he 
asked them, with an accent more emphatic than usual, whether 
in view of this collaboration of theirs, which was becoming 
more valuable to him and his original helpers every week, it 
was not time for a new departure. 

“Suppose I drop my dictatorship,” he said, “ suppose we set 
up parliamentary government, are you read}^ to take your 
share ? Are you ready to combine, to commit yourselves ? 
Are you ready for an effort to turn this work into something 
lasting and organic ? ” 

The men gathered round him smoked in silence for a minute. 
Old Macdonald, who had been sitting contentedly puffing 


600 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


away in a corner peculiarlj^ liis own, and dedicated to the 
glorification—in broad Berwickshire—of the experimental 
philosophers, laid down his pipe and put on his spectacles, 
that he might grasp the situation better. Then Lestraiige, in 
a dry, cautious way, asked Elsmere to explain himself further. 

Robert began to pace up and down, talking out his thought, 
his eye kindling. 

But in a minute or two he stopped abruptly, with one of 
those striking rapid gestures characteristic of him. 

“ But no mere social and educational body, mind you ! ” 
and his bright, commanding look swept round the circle. “A 
good thing surely, ‘ j^et is there better than it.’ The real 
difficulty of every social effort—you know it and I know it— 
lies, not in the planning of the work, but in the kindling of 
will and passion enough to carry it through. And that can 
only be done by religion—by faith.’” 

lie went back to his old leaning attitude, his hands behind 
him. The men gazed at him—at the slim figure, the trans¬ 
parent, changing face—with a kind of fascination, but were 
still silent, till Macdonald said slowly, taking off his glasses 
again and clearing his throat: 

‘‘You’ll be aboot starrtin’ a new church. I’m tliinkin’, 
Misther Elsmere ?” 

“If you like,” said Robert impetuously. “I have no fear 
of the great Avords. You can do nothing by despising the past 
and its products ; you can also do nothing by being too much 
afraid of them, by letting them choke and stifle j^our own life. 
Let the new Avine have its neAV bottles if it must, and neA’er 
mind Avords. Be content to be a ncAV ‘ sect,’ ‘conventicle,’ or 
Avhat not, so long as you feel that you are something with a 
life and purpose of its own, in this tangle of a AAmrld.” 

Again he ])aused AAutli knit broAVS, thinking. Lestrange sat 
with his elboAvs on liis knees stud^dng him, the spare, gray 
hair brushed back lightly from the bony face, on the lips the 
slightest Voltairean smile. Perhaps it AAm the coldness of 
his look AA’hich insensibly influenced Robert’s next words. 

“However, I don’t imagine we should call ourselves a 
church ! Something much humbler Avill do, if you choose ever 
to make anything of these suggestions of mine. ‘ Association,’ 
‘society,’ ‘brotherhood,’ Avhat you Avill ! But ahvays, if I can 
persuade you, A\dth something in the name, and everything in 
the body itself, to show that‘for the members of it life iTsts 
still, as all life Avorth having has everywhere rested, on trust and 
memory !—trust in the God of experience and histoiy; me?uo77/ 
of that God’s work in man, by Avhich alone we know him and 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


601 

can approach him. Well, of that work—T have tried to prove 
it to you a thousand times—Jesus of Nazareth has become to 
Its, by the evolution of circumstance, the most moving, the 
most efficacious of all types and epitomes. We have made 
our protest—we are daily making it—in the face of society, 
against the fictions and overgrowths which at the present 
time are excluding him more and more from human love. 
But now, suppose we turn our backs on negation, and have 
done with mere denial ! Suppose we throw all our energies 
into the practical building of a new house of faith, the gath- 
/ ering and organizing of a new Company of Jesus ! ” 

Other men had been stealing in while he was speaking. 
The little rooni was nearl}- full. It was strange, the contrast 
between the squalid modernness of the scene, with its incon¬ 
gruous sights and sounds, the club-room, painted in various 
hideous shades of cinnamon and green, the smoke, the lines 
and grou})s of working-men in every sort of working-dress, the 
occasional rumbling of huge wagons past the window, the 
click of glasses and cups in the refreshment bar outside, and 
this stir of spiritual passion which any competent observer 
' might have felt sweeping through the little crowd as Robert 
spoke, connecting what was passing there with all that is 
sacred and beautiful in the history of the world. 

After another silence a young fellow, in a shabb}^ velvet 
coat, stood u]). He was commonly known among his fellow- 
potters as “ the hartist,” because of his long hair, his little af¬ 
fectations of dress, and his aesthetic susceptibilities generalh^ 
The wits of the club made him their targets, but the teasing of 
him that went on was more or less tempered by the knowledge 
that in his own queer way he had brought up and educated 
two young sisters almost from infanc}", and that his sweetheart 
had been killed before his eyes a year before in a railway ac¬ 
cident. 

“ I dun know,” he said, in a high treble voice,. ‘‘ I dun know 
whether I speak for anybody but m^^self—very likely not ; but 
what I do know,” and he raised his right hand and shook it 
with a gesture of curious felicity, “ is this—what Mr. Elsmere 
starts i’ll join ; where he goes I’ll go ; what’s good enough 
- for him’s good enough for me. He’s put a new heart and a 
new stomach into me, and what I’ve pH he shall have, when¬ 
ever it pleases ’ini to call for it So if he wants to run a new 
thing against or alongside the old uns, and he wants me to 
help him Avith it—I don’t know as I’m very clear what he’s 
driving at nor Avhat good I can do ’im—but when Tom 
Wheeier’s asked for he’ll be there !” 


602 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


A deep murmur, rising almost into a shout of assent, ran 
througli the little assembly. Robert bent forward, his eyes 
glistening, a moved acknowledgment in his look and gesture. 
But in reality a pang ran through the fiery soul. It was 
‘‘the personal estimate,” after all, that was shaping theirfuture 
and his, and the idealist was up in arms for his idea, sublimely 
jealous lest any mere personal fancy should usurp its power 
and place. 

A certain amount of desultory debate followed as to the pos¬ 
sible outlines of a possible organization, and as to the observ¬ 
ances which might be devised to mark its religious character. 
As it flowed on the atmosphere grew more and more electric. 
A new passion, though still timid and awe-struck, seemed to 
shine from the looks of the men standing or sitting round the 
central figure. Even Lestrange lost his smile under the press¬ 
ure of that strange, subdued expectancy about him ; and when 
Robert walked homeward, about midnight, there weighed up¬ 
on him an almost awful sense of crisis, of an expanding future. 

He let himself in softly and went into his study. There he 
sank into a chair and fainted. He was probably not uncon¬ 
scious very long, but after he had struggled back to his senses, 
and was lying stretched on the sofa among the books with 
.which it was littered, the solitaiy candle in the big room 
throwing weird shadows about him, a moment of black de¬ 
pression overtook him. It was desolate and terrible, like a 
prescience of death. How was it he had come to feel so ill ? 
Suddenly, as he looked back over the preceding weeks, the 
physical weakness and disturbance which had marked them, 
and which he had struggled through, paying as little heed as 
possible, took shape, specter-like, in his mind. 

And at the same moment a passionate rebellion against 
weakness and disablement arose in him. He sat up dizzil}^, 
his head in his hands. 

“ Rest—strength,” he said to himself, with strong inner re¬ 
solve, “ for the work’s sake ! ” 

He dragged himself up to bed and said nothing to Catherine 
till the morning. Then, with boyish brightness, he asked her 
to take him and the babe off without delay to the Norman 
coast, vowing that he would lounge and idle for six whole 
weeks if she would let him. Shocked by his looks, she gradu¬ 
ally got from him the story of the night before. As he told 
it, his swoon was a mere untoward incident and hindrance in 
a spiritual drama, the thrill of which, while he described it, 
passed even to her. The contrast, however, between the strong 
hopes she felt pulsing through him, and his air of fragility 


ROBERT EL8MERB. 


G03 


aud exhaustion, seemed to melt the heart within her, and 
make her whole being, she hardly knew why, one sensitive 
dread. She sat beside him, her head laid against his shoulder, 
oppressed by a strange and desolate sense of her compara¬ 
tively small share in this ardent life. In spite of his tender¬ 
ness and devotion, she felt often as though he were no longer 
hers—as though a craving, hungry world, whose needs were 
all dark and unintelligible to her, were asking’him from her, 
claiming to use as roughly and prodigally as it pleased the 
quick mind and delicate frame. 

As to the schemes developing round him, she could not take 
them in whether for protest or s^^mpathy. She could think 
only of where to go, what doctor to consult, how she could 
persuade him to stay away long enough. 

There was little surprise in Elgood Street when Elsmere an- 
nounced that he must go off for awhile. He so announced it 
that everybody who heard him understand that his temporaiy 
withdrawal was to be the mere preparation for a great effort— 
the vigil before the tourney ; and the eager friendliness with 
which he was met sent him off in good heart. 

Three or four days later he, Catherine and Mary were at 
Petites Dalles, a little place on the Norman coast, near 
Fecamp, with which he had first made acquaintance years be¬ 
fore, when he was at Oxford. 

Here all that in London had been oppressive in the August 
heat suffered “ a sea change,” and became so much matter for 
physical delight. It was fiercely hot, indeed. Every morn¬ 
ing, between five and six o’clock, Catherine would standby the 
little white-veiled window, in the dewy silence, to watch the 
eastern shadows spreading sharply already into a blazing 
world of sun, and see the tall poplar just outside shooting into 
a quivering, changeless depth of blue. Then, as early as pos¬ 
sible, they would IS^lly forth before the glare became unbear¬ 
able. The first event of the day was always Mary’s bathe, 
which gradually became a spectacle for the whole beach, «o in¬ 
genious were the blandishments of the father who wooed her 
into the warm sandy shallows, and «o beguiling the glee and 
pluck of the two-year-old English behe. By eleven the heat 
out-of-doors grew intolerable, and they would stroll back- 
father and mother and trailing child—past the hotels on the 
plage, along the irregular village lane, to the little house where 
they had established themselves, with Mary’s nurse and a 
French homie to look after them; would find the green wooden 
shutters drawn close; the dejeuner waiting for them in the 


604 


nOBERT ELRMERE. 


cool, bare room; ami tlie scent of the coffee penetrating from 
the kitchen, wliere the two maids kept np a dumb but per- 
])etual warfare. Then afterward Mary, emerging from lier 
sunbonnet, would be tumbled into her white bed upstairs, and 
lie, a flushed image of sleep, till the patter of her little feet on 
the boards which alone separated one story from the other 
warned mother and nurse that an imp of mischief was let 
loose again. Meanwhile Robert, in the carpetless salon, would 
lie back in the rickety arm-chair, which was its only luxury, 
lazily dozing and dreaming, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but 
quite another comhlle hutnaine unrolling itself vaguely mean¬ 
while in the contriving optimist mind. 

Petites Dalles was not fashionable yet, though it aspired to 
be; but it could boast of a deputy, and a senator, and a pro¬ 
fessor of the College de France, as good as any at Etretat, a 
tired journalist or two, and a sparkling of Rouen men of 
business. Robert soon made friends among them, more siio, 
by dint of a rough-and-ready French, spoken with the most 
unblushing accent imaginable, and lounged along the sands 
through many an amusing and sociable hour with one or 
other of his new acquaintances. 

But by the evening husband and wife would leave the 
crowded beach, and mount by some tortuous, dusty way on to 
the high plateau through which was cleft far below the wooded 
fissure of the village. Here they seemed to have climbed the 
bean-stalk into the new world. The rich Normand^’^ country 
lay all round them—the corn-fields, the hedgeless tracts of 
white-flowered.lucerne or crimson clover, dotted by the orchard 
trees which make one vast garden of the land as one sees it 
from a height. On the fringe of the cliff, where the soil be¬ 
came too thin and barren even for French cultivation, there 
was a wild belt, half heather, half tangled grass and flower- 
growth, which the English pair loved for their own special 
reasons. Bathed in light, cooled by the4^vening wind, the 
patches of heather glowing, the tall grasses swaying in the 
breeze, there were moments when its wide, careless, dusty 
beauty reniind^'d them poignantly, and yet most sweetly, of 
the home of tlieir first unclouded happiness, of the Surrey 
commons and wildernesses. 

• One evening they were sitting in the w'arm dusk by the edge 
of a little dip of heather sheltered by a tuft of broom, when 
suddenly they heard the purring sound of the night-jar, and 
immediately after the bird itself lurched past them, and as it 
disappeared into the darkness they caught several times the 
characteristic click of the wing. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


605 


Catherine raised her hand and laid it On Robert’s. The 
sudden tears dropped on to her cheeks. 

“ Did you hear it, Robert ? ” 

lie drew her to him. These involuntary signs of an abiding 
pain in lier always smote him to the heart. 

“ I am not unhappy, Robert,” she said at last, raising her 
head. “ No ; if you will only get well and strong. I have 
subniitted. It is not for myself, but—” 

For what then ! Merely the touchingness of mortal things 
as such ?—of youth, of hope, of memory ? 

Choking down a sob, she looked seaward over the curling 
flame-colored waves, while he held her hand close and tender¬ 
ly. No—she was not unhappy. Something, indeed, had gone 
forever out of that early joy. Her life had been caught and 
nipped in the great inexoi*able wheel of things. It would go 
in some sense maimed to the end. Rut the bitter self-tortur¬ 
ing of that first endless year was over. Love, and her husband, 
and the thousand subtle forces of a changing world had con¬ 
quered. She would live and die steadfast to the old faiths. 
Rut her present mind and.its outlook was no more the mind of 
her early mariTed life than the Christian pliilosophy of to-day 
is the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages. She was not 
conscious of change, but change there was. She had, in fact, 
undergone that dissociation of the moral judgment from a 
special series of religious formulae which is the crucial, the 
epoch-making fact of our day. “ Unbelief,” says the ortho¬ 
dox preacher, “ is sin, and implies it”; and while he speaks 
the saint in the unbeliever gently smiles down his argument, 
and suddenly, in the rebel of yesterday men see the rightful 
heir of to-morrow. 


CHAPTER XLVH. 

Meanwhile the Leyburns were at Rurwood again. Rose’s 
summer, indeed, was much varied by visits to country houses 
—many of them belonging to friends and acquaintances of the 
Flaxman family—by concerts, and the demands of several new 
and exciting artistic friendships. Rut she was seldom loth to 
come back to the little bare valley and the gray-walled liouse. 
Even the rain which poured down in August, quite unabashed 
by any consciousness of fine weather elsewhere, was not as 
intolerable to her as in past days. 

The girl was not herself ; there was visible in her not only 
that general softening and deepening of character which had 
been the consequence of her trouble in the spring, but a pain¬ 
ful ennui she could hardly disguise, a longing for she kne\y 


606 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


not what. Slie was beginning to take the homage paid to her 
gift and lier beauty with a quiet dignity, whicli was in no 
sense false modesty, but implied a certain clearness of vision, 
curious and disquieting in so young and dazzling a creature. 
And when she came home fi’om her travels she would develop 
a taste for long walks, breasting the mountains, in rain or sun, 
penetrating to their austerest solitudes alone, as though 
haunted by that profound sa3dng of Obermann, “ Man is not 
made for enjoyment only— la tristesse fait aussi partie de ses 
vastes besomsy 

What, indeed, was it that ailed her? In her lonel}^ 
moments, esj)ecially in those moments among the high fells, 
beside some little tarn or streamlet, while the sheets of mist 
swept by her, or the great clouds dappled the spreading sides 
of tlm hills, she thought often of Langham—of that first thrill 
of passion which had passed through her, delusive and abortive, 
like one of those first thrills of spring which bring out the 
buds, only to provide victims for the frost. Now with her 
again “ a moral east wind was blowing.” The ])assion was 
gone. The thought of Langham still roused in her a pity that 
seemed to strain at her heart-strings. But w*as it really she, 
really this veiy Rose, who had rested for that one intoxicating 
instant oil his breast? She felt a sort of bitter shame over 
her own shallowness of feeling. She must surelj" be a poor 
creature, else how could such a thing have befallen her and 
have left so little trace behind. 

And then, her hand dabbling in the water, her face raised 
to the blind, friendly mountains, she would go dreaming far 
afield. Little vignettes of London would come and go on the 
inner retina ; smiles and sighs would follow one another. 

‘‘ IToio kind he icas that time ! IIoio amusing this! ’’ 

Or, IIoio provokmg he teas that afternoon! how cold that 
evening ! ” 

Notliing else—the pronoun remained ambiguous. 

“ I want a friend ! ” she said to herself once as she was sit¬ 
ting far up in the bosom of High Fell, ‘‘ I want a friend badly. 
Yet ny^ lover deserts me, and I send awaj^ friend ! ” 

One afternoon Mrs. Thornburgh, the vicar, and Rose were 
wandering round the church-yard together, enjo3dng a break 
of suun}^ weather after days of rain. ]\Irs. Thornburgh’s per¬ 
sonal accent, so to speak, had grown perhaps a little more 
defined, a little more emphatic even, than when we first knew 
her. Tlie vicar, on the other hand, was a trifle graj^er, a trifle 
more submissive, as though on the whole, in the long conjugal 
contest of life, he was getting clearly- worsted as tlm years 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


607 


went on. But the performance tlirough which his wife was 
liow taking him tried him exceptionally, and she only kept 
him to it with difficulty. She had had an attack of bronchitis 
in the spring, and was still somewhat delicate—a fact which to 
his mind gave her an unfair advantage of him. For she 
would make use of it to keep constantly before him ideas 
whicli he disliked, and in which he considered she took a mor¬ 
bid and unbecoming ])leasure. The vicar was of opinion that 
when his latter end overtook him he should meet it on the 
whole as courageously as other men. But he was altogether 
averse to dwelling upon it, or the adjuncts of it, beforehand. 
Mrs. Thornburgh, however, since her illness had awoke to that 
inquisitive, affectionate interest in these very adjuncts which 
many women feel. And it was extremely disagreeable to the 
vicar. 

At the present moment she was engaged in choosing the 
precise spots in the little church-yard where it seemed to her 
it would be pleasant to rest. There was one corner in particu¬ 
lar which attracted her, and she stood now looking at it with 
measuring eyes and a dissatisfied mouth. 

“ William, I wish you would come here and help me ! ” 

The vicar took no notice, but went on talking to Rose. 

“ William ! ” imperatively. 

The vicar turned unwillingly. 

‘‘ You know, William, if you wouldn’t mind lying with 
your feet that way, there would be just room for me. But of 
course, if you loill have them the other way—” The shoul¬ 
ders in the old black silk mantle went up, and the gray curls 
shook dubiously. 

The vicar’s countenance showed plainly that he thought the 
remark worse than irrelevant. 

‘‘ My dear,” he said crossly, I am not thinking of those 
things, nor do I wish to think of them. Everything has its 
time and place. It is close on tea, and Miss Rose says she 
must be going home.” 

Mrs. Thornburgh again shook her head, this time with a 
disapproving sigh. 

‘‘ You talk, William,” she said severely, ‘‘ as if you were a 
young man, instead of being turned sixty-six last birth-day.” 

And again she measured the spaces with her eye, checking 
the results aloud. But the vicar was obdurately deaf. He 
strolled on with Rose, who was chattering to him about a visit 
to Manchester, and the little church gate clicked behind them. 
Hearing it, Mrs. Thornburgh relaxed her measurements. 
They were only really interesting to her, after all, when the 


608 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


vicar was by. She hurried after them as fast as her short, 
squat figure would allow, and stopped midway to make an ex¬ 
clamation. 

“A carriage ! ” she said, shading her eyes wdth a very plump 
hand, ‘‘stopping at Greybarns ! ” 

The one road of the valley was visible from the church-yard, 
winding along the bottom of the shallow green trough, for at 
least two miles. The Greybarns was a farm-house just beyond 
Burwood, about half a mile away. 

Mrs. Thornburgh moved on, her matronly face aglow with 
interest. 

“ Mary Jenkinsoii taken ill ! ” she said. “ Of course, that’s 
Doctor Baker ! Well, it’s to be hoped it won’t be twins this 
time. But, as I told her last Sunday, ‘ It’s constitutional, my 
dear,’ I knew a woman who had three pairs ! Five o’clock now. 
Well, about seve^i it’ll be worth while sending to inquire.” 

When she overtook the vicar and his companion she began 
to whisper certain particulars into the ear that was not on 
Rose’s side. The vicar, who, like Uncle Toby, was possessed of 
a fine natural modesty, would have preferred that his wife 
should refrain from whispering on these topics in Rose’s pres¬ 
ence. But he submitted lest opposition should provoke her 
into still more audible improprieties ; and Rose walked on a 
step or two in front of the pair, her ej^es twinkling a little. 
At the vicarage gate she Avas let off Avithout the customary 
final gossip. Mrs. Thornburgh Avas so much occupied in the 
fate hanging over Mary Jenkinsoii that she, for once*, forgot 
to catechise Rose as to any marriageable young men she 
might have come across in a recent visit to a great country- 
house of the neighborhood ; an operation Avhich formed the 
invariable pendant to any of Rose’s absences. 

So, Avith a smiling nod to them both, the girl turned home¬ 
ward. As she did so she became aware of a man’s figure 
walking along the space of road betAveen Greybarns and Bur- 
wood, the western light behind it. 

Dr. Baker? But even granting that Mrs. Jenkinson had 
brought him five miles on a false alarm, in the provoking man¬ 
ner of matrons, the shortest professional visit could not be 
over in this time. 

She looked again, shading her eyes. She was nearing the 
gate of Burwood, and iiiA-oluntarily slackened step. The man 
who was approacliing, catching sight of the slim girlish figure 
in the broad hat and pink and AAdiite cotton dress, hurried up. 
The color rushed to Rose’s cheek. In another minute she and 
Hugh Flaxman Avere face to face. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


GUO 


She could not hide her astonishment. 

“ Why are you not in Scotland ? ” she said, after she had 
given him her hand. “ Lady Helen told me last week she ex¬ 
pected jmu in Ross-sliire.” 

Directly the words left her mouth she felt she had given 
him an opening. And why had nature plagued her with this 
trick of blushing ? 

“ Because I am here ! ” he said, smiling, bis keen, dancing 
ej^es looking down upon her. He was bronzed as she had 
never seen him. And never had he seemed to bring with him 
such an atmosphere of cool, pleasant strength. “ I have slain 
so much since the first of July that I can slay no more. I am 
not like other men. The Nimrod in me is easily gorged, and 
goes to sleep after awhile. So this is Burwood ? ” 

He had caught her just on the little sweep leading to the 
gate, and now liis eyes swept quickly over the modest old house, 
with its trim garden, its*overgrown porch and open casement 
windows. She dared not ask liim again wh}" he was there. In 
the properest manner she invited him ‘‘ to come in and see 
mamma.” 

“ I hope Mrs. Leyburn is better than she was in town ? I 
shall be delighted to see her. But must you go in so soon ? I 
left my carriage half a mile below, and have been reveling in 
the sun and air. I am loth to go in-doors yet awhile. Are 
you busy ? Would it trouble you to put me in the way to-the 
heal ■ J'b: valley? Then, if you will allow me, I will present 
my; ‘ : 'er.” 

Rose thought his request as little in the ordinary line of 
things as his appearance. But she turned and walked beside 
him, pointing out the crags at the head, the great sweep of 
High Fell, and the pass over to Ullswater, with as much sang¬ 
froid as she was mistress of. 

He, on his side, informed her that on his way to Scotland 
he had bethought himself that he had never seen the Lakes, 
that he had stopped at Whinborough, was bent on walking 
over the High Fell pass to Ullswater, and making his way 
thence to Ambleside, Grasmere and Keswick. 

But you are much too late to-day to get to Ullswater ? ” 
cried Rose, incautiously. 

“ Certainl}'. You see my hotel,” and he pointed, smiling, to 
a white farm-house standing just at the bend of the valley, 
where the road turned toward Whinborough. “I persuaded 
the good woman there to give me a bed for the night, took my 
carriage a little furthei*, then, knowing I had friends in these 
parts/l came on to explore.” 



610 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


Rose angrily felt her liusli getting deeper and deeper. 

“ You are the first tourist,” she said, coolly, ‘‘ who has ever 
stayed in Whindale.” 

“ Tourist ! I repudiate the name. I am a worshiper at the 
shrine of Wordsworth and Nature. Helen and I long ago de¬ 
fined a tourist as a being with straps. I defy you to dis¬ 
cover a strap about me, and I left my Murray in the railway 
carriage.” 

He looked at her, laughing. She laughed, too. The infec¬ 
tion of his strong, sunny presence was irresistible. In London 
it had been so easy to stand on her dignity, to remember 
whenever he was friendly that the night before he had been 
distant. In these green solitudes it was not easy to be any¬ 
thing but natural—the child of the moment! 

“ You are neither more practical nor more economical than 
when I saw you last,” she said demurely. “ When did you 
leave Norway ? ” 

They wandered on past the vicarage, talking fast. Mr. Flax- 
man, who had been joined for a time, on his fishing tour, by 
Lord Waynflete, was giving Jier an amusing account of the 
susceptibility to titles shown by the primitive democrats of 
Norway. As they passed a gap in the vicarage hedge, laugh¬ 
ing and chatting, Rose became aware of a window and a gray 
head hastily withdrawn. Mr. Flaxman was puzzled by the 
merry flash, instantly suppressed, that shot across her face. 

Presently they reached the hamlet of High Close, and the 
house where Mary Backhouse died, and where her father and 
the poor bedridden Jim still lived. They mounted the path 
behind it, and plunged into the hazel plantation which had 
sheltered Robert and Catherine on a memorable night. But 
when they were through it Rose turned to the right along a 
scrambling path leading to the top of the first great shoulder 
of High Fell. It was a steep climb, though a short one, and it 
seemed to Rose that when she had once let him help her over 
a rock her hand was never her own again. He kept it an al¬ 
most constant prisoner on one pretext or another till they were 
at the top. 

Then she sank down on a rock out of breath. He stood be¬ 
side her, lifting his brown wideawake from his brow. The air 
below had been warm and relaxing. Here it played upon 
them both with a delicious, life-giving freshness. He looked 
round on the great hollow bosom of the fell, the crags but¬ 
tressing it on either hand, the winding greenness of the valley, 
the white sparkle of the river. 

‘‘ It reminds me a little of Norway. The same austere and 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


611 


frugal beauty—the same bare valley floors. But no pines, no 
peaks, no flords ! ” 

‘‘No ! ” said Rose scornfully, “we are not Norway, and we 
are not Switzerland. To prevent disappointment, I may at 
once inform you that we have no glaciers, and that there is 
perhaps only one place in the district where a man who was 
not an idiot could succeed in killing himself.” 

He looked at her, calmly smiling. 

“ You are angry,” he said, “ because I make comparisons. 
You are wholly on a wrong scent. I never saw a scene in tlie 
world that pleased me half as much as this bare valley, that 
gray roof ”—and he pointed to Burwood among its trees— 

“ and this knoll of rocky ground.” 

His look traveled back to her, and her eyes sank beneath it. 
He threw himself down on the short grass beside her. 

“ It rained this morning,” she still had the spirit to murmur 
under her breath. 

He took not the smallest heed. 

“ Do you know,” he said, and his voice dropped, “can you 
guess at all why I am here to-day ? ” 

“You had never seen the Lakes,” she repeated in a prim 
voice, her eyes still cast down, the corners of her mouth twitch¬ 
ing. “ You stopped at Whinborough, intending to take the 
pass over to Ullswater, thence to make your way to Ambleside 
and Keswick—or was it to Keswick and Ambleside ?” 

She looked up innocently. But the flashing glance she met 
abashed her again. 

Taquinel'''^ he said, “ but you shall not laugh me out of 
countenance. If I said all that to jmu just now, may I be 
forgiven. One purpose, only one, brought me from Norway, 
forbade me to go to Scotland, drew me to Whinborough, 
guided me up your valley—the purpose of seeing your face ! ” 

It could not be said at that precise moment that he had at¬ 
tained it. Rather she seemed bent on hiding that face quite 
away from him. It seemed to him an age before, drawn by 
the magnetism of his look, her hands dropped, and she faced 
him, crimson, her breath fluttering a little. Then she would 
have spoken, but he would not let her. Very tenderly 
and quietly his hand possessed itself of hers as he knelt 
beside her. 

“ I have been in exile for two months—you sent me. I saw 
that I troubled you in London'. You thought I was pursuing 
you—pressing you. Your manner said ‘ Go ! ’ and I went. 
But do you think that for one day, or hour, or moment I have 
thought of anything else in those Norway woods but of you 


012 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


and of this blessed moment when I should be at your feet, as 
I am now ? ” 

She trembled. Her hand seemed to leap in his. His gaze 
melted, enwrapped lier. He bent forward. In another mo¬ 
ment her silence would have so answered for her that his 
covetous arras would liave stolen about her for good and all. 
But suddenly a kind of shiver ran through her—a shiver which 
was half memory, half shame. She drew back violently, 
covering her eyes with her hand. 

“ Oh, no, no ! ” she cried, and her other hand struggled to get 
free, “ don’t, don’t talk to me so—I have a—a confession.” 

He watched her, his lips trembling a little, a smile of the 
most exquisite indulgence and understanding dawning in his 
eyes. AVas she going to confess to liini what he knew so well 
already ? If he could only force her to say it on his breast. 

But she held him at arm’s length. 

“ You remember—you remember Mr. Langham ? ” 

“ Remember him ! ” echoed Mr. Flaxnian fervently. 

“ That thought-reading night at Lady Charlotte’s, on the 
way home, he spoke to me. I said I loved him. I did love 
him ; I let him kiss me ! ” 

Her flush had quite faded. He could hardly tell whether 
she was yielding or defiant as the words burst from her. 

An expression, half trouble, half compunction, came into 
his face. 

I knew,” he said, very low ; or rather, I guessed.” And 
for an instant it occurred to him to unburden liimself, to ask 
her pardon for that espionage of his. But no, no ; not till he 
had her safe. “ I guessed, I mean, that there had been some¬ 
thing grave between you. I saw you were sad. I would have 
given the world to comfort you.” 

Her lip quivered childishly. 

“ I said I loved him that night. The next morning he 
wrote to me that it could never be.” 

He looked at her a moment embarrassed. The conversation 
was not easy. Then the smile broke once more. 

“ And you have forgotten him as he deserved. If I were 
not sure of that I could wish him all the tortures of the ‘ In¬ 
ferno’ ! As it is, I can not think of him ; I can not let jmu 
think of him. Sweet, do you know that ever since I first saw 
you the one thought of my daj^s, the dream of my nights, the 
purpose of my whole life, has been to win yon ? There was 
another in the field ; I knew it. I stood b}" and waited. He 
failed you—I knew he must in some form or other. Then I 
was hasty, and you resented it. Little tyi*ant, you made your- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


613 


self a Rose with many thorns ! But, tell me, tell me, it is all 
over—your pain, my waiting. Make yourself sweet to me! 
unfold to me at last ? ” 

An instant she wavered. His bliss was almost in his grasp. 
Then she sprang up, and Flaxman found himself standing by 
her, rebuffed and surprised. 

“ No, no ! ” she cried, holding out her hands to him through 
all the time. “ Oh, it is too soon ! I should despise mj'-self, I 
do despise myself. It tortures me that I can change and for¬ 
get so easily ; it ought to torture you. Oli, don’t ask me yet 
to—to—” 

“ To be my wife,” he said calmly, his cheek a little flushed, 
his eye meeting hers with a passion in it that strove so hard 
for self-control it was almost sternness. 

‘‘ Not yet ! ” she pleaded, and then, after a moment’s hesi¬ 
tation, she broke into the most appealing smiles, though the 
tears were in her eyes, hurrying out the broken, beseeching 
Avorcls. “ I want a friend so much—a real friend. Since 
Catherine left I have had no one. I have been running riot. 
Take me in hand. Write to me, scold me, advise me ; I will 
be your pupil, I will tell you everything. You seem to me so 
fearfully wise, so much older. Oh, don’t be vexed. And— 
and—in six months—” 

She turned away, rosy as her name. He held her still, so 
rigidly, that her hands were almost hurt. The shadow of the 
hat fell over her eyes ; the delicate outlines of the neck and 
shoulders in the pretty pale dress were deflned against the 
green hill background. He studied her deliberately, a hundred 
different expressions sweeping across his face. A debate of 
the most feverish interest was going on within him. Her 
seriousness at the moment, the chances of the future, her 
character, his own—all these knotty points entered into it, had 
to be weighed and decided with lightning rapidity. But 
Hugh Flaxman was born under a lucky star, and the natal 
charm held good. 

At last he gave a long breath ; he stooped and kissed her 
hands. 

“So be it. For six months I will be your guardian, your 
friend, your teasing, implacable censor. At the end of that 
time I will be—well, never mind what. I give you fair 
warning.” 

He released her. Rose clasped her hands before her and 
stood drooping. Now that she had gained her point, all her 
bright, mocking independence seemed to have vanished. She 
might have been in reality the tremulous, timid child she 


614 


IWBEliT ELSMERE. 


seemed. Ills spirits rose ; he began to like the role she had 
assigned to him. The touch of unexpectedness, in all she said 
and did, acted with exhilarating force on his fastidious, ro¬ 
mantic sense. 

“ Now, then,” he said, picking up her gloves from the grass, 
“ you have given me my rights ; I will begin to exercise them 
at once. I must take you home, the clouds are coming up 
again, and on the way will you kindly give me a full, true, 
and minute account of these two months during which you 
have been so dangerously left to jmur own devices ? ” 

She hesitated, and began to speak with difficult}^, her eyes 
on the ground. By the time they were in the main Shan- 
moor path again, and she was not so weakly" dependent on his 
phj^sical aid, her spirits too returned. Pacing along with her 
hands behind her, slie began by degrees to throw into her ac¬ 
counts of her various visits and performances plenty of her 
natural malice. 

And after a bit, as that strange storm of feeling which had 
assailed her on the mountain-top abated something of its be- 
wildei'ing force, certain old grievances began to raise very 
lively heads in her. The smart of Lady Fauntleroy’s ball was 
still there ; she had not yet forgiven him all those relations ; 
and the teasing image of Lady Florence woke up in her. 

“ It seems to me,” he said at last, dryly, as he opened a gate 
for her not far from Burwood, “ that you have been making 
yourself agreeable to a vast number of people. In my new 
capacity of censor I should like to warn you that there is 
nothing so bad for the character as universal popularity.” 

“Thave not got a thousand and one important cousins ! ” 
she exclaimed, her lip curling. “ If I want to please, I must 
take pains, else ‘nobody minds me.’” 

lie looked at her attentively, his handsome face aglow with 
animation. 

“ What can you mean by that ? ” he said slowly. 

But she was quite silent, her head well in air. 

“ Cousins ?” he repeated. “ Cousins ? And clearly meant 
as a taunt at me! Now when did you see my cousins? I 
grant that I possess a monstrous and indefensible number. I 
have it. You think that at Lady Fauntleroy’s ball I devoted 
mj^self too much to my family, and too little to—” 

“ Not at all ! ” cried Rose, hastily, adding, with charming 
incoherence, while she twisted a sprig of honeysuckle in her 
restless fingers, “ Some cousins of course are pretty.” 

He paused an instant ; then a light broke over his face, and 
his burst of quiet laughter was infinitely pleasant to hear. 


IWBEllT ELSMERE. 


615 


Rose got redder and redder. She realized diml}^ that she was 
hardly maintaining the spirit of their contract, and that hcAvas 
studying lier with eyes inconveniently bright and penetrating. 

“ Shall I quote to you,” he said, “ a sentence of Sterne’s ? If 
it violate our contract I must plead extenuating circumstances. 
Sterne is admonishing a young friend as to liis manners in 
society : ‘ You are in love,’ he says. ‘ Tant mieiix. Rut do not 
imagine that the fact bestows on 3^011 a license tobeliave like a 
bear toward all the rest of the world. Affection may surely 
conduct thee through an avenue of loomen to her icho possesses 
thy heart loithoiit tearing the flounces of any of their petticoats'' 
—not even those of little cousins of seventeen ! I sa}?" this, 3^011 
will observe, in the capacit3' you have assigned me. In another 
capacity^ I venture to think I could justify myself still better.” 

“ My guardian and director,” cried Rose, “ must not begin 
his functions by misleading and sophistical quotations from 
the classics ! ” 

He did not ansAver for a moment. The3’’ Avere at the gate 
of Burwood, under a thick screen of Avild che-riy-trees. The 
gate Avas half open, and his hand Avas on it. 

“ And my pupil,” he said, bending to her, “ must not begin 
b3" challenging the prisoner whose hands she has bound, or he 
Avill not answer for the consequences ! ” 

His words AA^ere threatening, but his voice, his fine, expres¬ 
sive face, AA^ere infinitely SAveet. B3" a kind of fascination she 
never aftei'Avard understood. Rose for ansAA^er startled him and 
herself. She bent her head ; she laid her lips on the hand 
Avhich held the gate, and she Avas through it in an instant. 
He folloAA’ed her in vain. He never overtook her till at the 
draAving-roorn door she paused Avith amazing dignity. 

‘‘Mamma,” she said, throAving it open, “here is Mr. Flax- 
man. He is come from Norwa3q and is on his Avay to Ulls- 
Avater. I Avill go and speak to Margaret about tea.” 

CHAPTER XLVHI. 

After the little incident recorded at the end of the preceding- 
chapter, HugliFlaxman nia3" be forgiven if, as he Avalked home 
along tlie valley that night toAvard the farm-house Avhere he 
had established himself, he entertained a ver3^ comfortable 
skepticism as to the permanence of that curious contract into 
Avhich Rose had just forced him. IIoAvever, he Avas quite mis¬ 
taken. Rose’s maiden dignit3^ avenged itself abundantl3" on 
Hugh Flaxman for the injui-ies it had received at the hands of 
Langham. The restraints, the anomalies, the hair-s])littings 
of the situation delighted her ingenuous 3muth. “ I am free— 


616 


ROBERl ELSMERE. 


lie is free. We will be friends for six months. Possibly we 
not suit one another at all. If we do— then —” 

In the thrill of that theti lay, of course, the whole attraction 
of the position. 

So the next morning Hugh Flaxrnan saw the comedy was 
to be scrupulously kept up. It required a tolerably strong 
masculine certainty at the bottom of him to enable him to 
resign himself once more to his part. But he achieved it, and 
being himself a modern of the moderns, a lover of half-shades 
and refinements of all sorts, he began very soon to enjoy it, 
and to play it with an increasing cleverness and perfection. 

How Rose got through Agnes’s cross-questioning on the 
matter history sayeth not. Of one tiling, however, a conscien¬ 
tious historian may be sure, namel}'’, that Agnes succeeded in 
knowing as much as she wanted to know. Mrs. Leyburn was 
a little puzzled by the erratic lines of Mr. Flaxman’s journeys. 
It was, as she said, curious that a man should start on a tour 
through .the Lakes from Long Whindale. 

But she took everything naivel}’^ as it came, and as she was 
told. Nothing with her ever passed through any changing 
crucible of thought. It required no planning to elude her. 
Her mind was like a stretch of wet sand, on which all impres¬ 
sions are equally easy to make and equally fugitive. lie liked 
them all, she supposed, in spite of the comparative scantiness 
of his later visits to Lerwick Gardens, or he would not have 
come out of his way to see them. But as nobody suggested 
anything else to her, her mind worked no further, and she 
was as easily beguiled after his appearance as before it by the 
intricacies of some new knitting. 

Thing's of course mig-ht have been different if Mrs. Thorn- 
burgh had interfered again; but, as we know, poor Cathe¬ 
rine’s sorrows had raised a whole odd host of misgivings in the 
mind of the vicar’s wife. She prowled nervously round Mrs. 
Leyburn, filled with contempt for her placidity; but she did not 
attack her. She spent herself, indeed, on Rose and Agnes, but 
long practice had made them adepts in the art of baffling her; 
and when Mr. Flaxrnan went to tea at the vicarage in their 
company, in spite of an absorbing desire to get at the truth, 
which caused her to forget a new cap, and let fall a plate of 
tea-cakes, she was obliged to confess crossly to the vicar after¬ 
ward that “ no one could tell what a man like that was after. 
She supposed his manners were veiy aristocratic, but for her 
part she liked ])lain people.” 

On the last morning of Mr. Flaxman’s stay in the valley, he 
entered the Burwood drive about eleven o’clock, and Rose 


nOBERT ELSMERE. 


617 


came down the steps to meet him. For a moment he flattered 
himself that her disturbed looks were due to the nearness of 
their farewells. 

“ There is something wrong,” he said softly, detaining her 
hand a moment—so much, at least, was in his right. 

“ Robert is ill. There has been an accident at Petites Dalles. 
He has been in bed for a week. They hope to get home in a few 
days. Catherine writes bravely, but she is evidently very low.” 

Iliigh Flaxman’s face fell. Certain letters he iiad received 
from Elsmere in July had lain heavy on his mind ever since, 
so pitiful was the half-conscious revelation in them of an in¬ 
cessant physical struggle. An accident! Elsmere was in no 
state for accidents. What miserable ill-luck ! 

Rose read him Catherine’s account. It appeared that on a 
certain stormy day a swimmer had been observed in diflicul- 
ties among the rocks skirting the northern side of the Petites 
Dalles Bay. The old haigneur of the place, owner of the still 
primitive etablissement des bains, without stopping to strip, or 
even to take off his heavy boots, went out to the man in danger 
with a plank. The man took the plank and was safe. Then to 
the people watching it became evident tliat the baigneiir him¬ 
self was in peril. He became unaccountably feeble in the 
water, and the cry rose that he was sinking. Robert, who 
happened to be bathing near, ran off to the S2)ot, jumped in, 
and swam out. By this time the old man had drifted some 
way. Robert succeeded, however, in bringing him in, and then, 
amid an excited crowd, headed by the baigneur's wailing 
family, they carried the unconscious form on to the higher 
beach. Elsmere was certain life was not extinct, and sent off 
for a doctor. Meanwhile no one seemed to have any common 
sense, or any knowledge of how to proceed, but himself. For 
two hours he stayed on the beach in his drijDping bathing- 
clothes, a cold wind blowing, trying every device known to 
him: rubbing, hot bottles, artificial resinration. In vain. The 
man was too old and too bloodless. Directly after the doctor 
arrived he breathed his last, amid the wild and |)assionate 
grief of wife and children. 

Robert, with a cloak flung about him, still stayed to talk to 
the doctor, to carry one of the baigneur's sobbing grandchildren 
to its mother in the village. Then, at last, Catherine got hold 
of him, and he submitted to be taken home, shivering, and 
deeply depressed by the failure of his efforts. A violent gastric 
and lung chill declared itself almost immediately, and for three 
days he had been anxiously ill. Catherine, miserable, distrust¬ 
ing the local doctor, and not knowing how to get hold of a 


G18 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


better one, had never left him night or day, “I had not^ the 
heart to write even to yon,” slie wrote to her mother. “ I 
could think of nothing but trying one thing after another. 
Now he has been in bed eight days, and is much better. He 
talks of getting up to-morrow, and declares he must go home 
next week. I have tried to persuade him to stay here another 
fortnight, but the thought of his work distresses him so mucli 
that I hardly dare urge it. I can not say how I dread the 
journey. He is not fit for it in any way.” 

Hose folded up the letter, her face softened to a most 
womanly gravity. •Hugh Flaxman paused a moment outside 
the door, his hands on his sides, considering. 

“I shall not go on to Scotland,” he said ; “Mrs. Elsmere 
must not be left. I will go off there at once.” 

In Rose’s soberly sweet looks as he left her, Hugh Flaxman 
saw for an instant, with the stirring of a joy as profound as it 
was delicate, not the fanciful enchantress of the day before, 
but his wife that was to be. And yet she held him to his bar¬ 
gain. All that his lips touched as he said good-by was the 
little bunch of yellow brier roses slie gave him from her belt. 

Thirty hours later he was descending the long hill from 
Sassetot to Petites Dalles. It was the 1st of September. A 
chilly west wind blew up the dust before him and stirred the 
parched leafage of the valley. He knocked at the dooi', of 
which the wood-work was all peeled and blistered by the sun. 
Catherine herself opened it. 

“ This is kind—this is like yourself ! ” she said, after a first 
stare of amazement, when he had explained himself. “ He is 
in there, much better.” 

Robert looked up, stupefied, as Hugh Flaxman entered. 
But he sprang up with his old brightness. 

“ Well, this is friendship ! What on earth brings you here, 
old fellow ! Why aren’t you in the stubbles celebrating St. 
Partridge ? ” 

Hugh Flax^nan said what he he had to say very shortl}’’, but 
so as to make Robert’s 03^8 gleam, and to bring his thin hand 
with a sort of caressing touch upon Flaxman’s shoulder. 

“ I sha’n’t tiy to thank 3mu—Catherine can if she likes. 
How relieved she will be about that bothering journe}^ of ours ! 
However, I am really ever so much better. It was very sharp 
while it lasted ; and the doctor no great shakes. But there 
never was such a woman as my wife ; she pulled me through ! 
And now tlien, sir, just kindly confess 3murself a little more 
plainly. What brought you and my sisters-in-law together ? 
You need not try and persuade me that Long Whindale is the 


ROBERT ELISMERE. 


010 


natural gate of the Lakes, or the route intended by Heaven 
from London to Scotland, though I have no doubt you tried 
that little fiction on them.’ 

Hugh Flaxman laughed, and sat down very deliberately. 

“ I am glad to see that illness has not robbed you of that 
perspicacity for which you are so remarkable, Elsmere. Well, 
the day before yesterday I asked your sister Rose to marry 
me. She—” 

‘‘ Go on, man,” cried Robert, exasperated by his pause. 

“ I don’t know how to put it,” said Flaxman calmly. “ For 
six months we are to be rather more than friends, and a good 
deal less than fia7ices. I am to be allowed to write to her. 
You may imagine how seductive it is to one of the worst and 
laziest letter-writers in the three kingdoms that his fortunes 
in love should be made to depend on his correspondence. I may 
scold her if she gives me occasion. And in six months, as one 
says to a publisher, ‘ the agreement will be open to revision.’ ” 

Robert stared. 

“ And you are not engaged ? ” 

“Not as I understand it,” replied Flaxman. “Decidedly 
not ! ” he added, with energy, remembering that very platonic 
farewell. 

Robert sat with his hands on his knees, ruminating. 

“ A fantastic thing, the modern young woman ! Still I 
think I can understand. There may have been more than 
mere caprice in it.” 

His eye met his friend’s significantly. 

“ I suppose so,” said Flaxman quietly. Not even for Rob¬ 
ert’s benefit was he going to reveal any details of that scene 
on High Fell. “ Never mind, old fellow, I am content. And, 
indeedi, fante de mieiix^ I should be content with anything that 
brought me nearer to her, were it but the thousandth of an 
inch.” 

Robert grasped his hand affectionately. 

“ Catherine,” he called through the door, “ never mind the 
supper ; let it burn. Flaxman brings news.” 

Catherine listened to the story with amazement. Certainly 
her ways would never have been as her sister’s. 

“ Are we supposed to know ? ” she asked very naturally. 

“ She never forbade me to tell,” said Flaxman smiling. “ I 
think, however, if I were you, I should say nothing about it— 
yet. I told her it was part of our bargain that she should ex¬ 
plain my letters to Mrs. Leyburn. I gave her free leave to in¬ 
vent any fairy tale she pleased, but it was to be her invention, 
not mine.” 


620 


BOBEET ELSMERE. 


Neither Robert nor Catherine were very well pleased. But 
tliere was something reassuring as well as comic in the stoicism 
with which Flaxman took his position. And clearly the matter 
must be left to manage itself. 

Next morning the weather had improved. Robert, his hand 
on Flaxman’s arm, got down to the beach. Flaxman watched 
him critically, did not like some of his symptoms, but thought 
on the whole he must be recovering at the normal rate, consid¬ 
ering how severe the attack had been. 

“ What do you think of him ? ” Catherine asked him next 
day, with all her soul in her ej^es. They had left Robert estab¬ 
lished in a sunny nook, and were strolling on along the sands. 

“ I think you must get him home, call in a first-rate doctor, 
and keep him quiet,” said Flaxman. He will be all right 
presently.” 

“ How can we keep him quiet ? ” said Catherine, with a mo¬ 
mentary despair in her fine pale face. “ All day long and all 
night long he is thinking of his work. It is like something 
fiery burning the heart out of him.” 

Flaxman felt the truth of the remark during the four days of 
calm autumn weatlier he spent with them before the return 
journey. Robert would talk to him for hours, now on the 
sands, witli the gray infinity of sea before them, now pacing 
the bounds of tlieir little room till fatigue made him drop heav¬ 
ily into his long chair; and the burden of it all was the relig¬ 
ious future of the working class. He described the scene in 
the club, and brought out the dreams swarming in his mind, 
presenting them for Flaxman’s criticism, and dealing with 
them himself with that startling mixture of acute common 
sense and eloquent passion which had always made him so ef¬ 
fective as an initiator. Flaxman listened dubiously at first, as 
he generally listened to Elsmere, and then was carried away, 
not by the beliefs, but by the man. He found his pleasure in 
dallying with the magnificentof the Church; doubt 
with him applied to all propositions, whether positive or nega¬ 
tive; and he had the dislike of the aristocrat and the cosmo¬ 
politan for the provincialisms of religious dissent. A()iitical 
dissent or social reform was another matter. Since dev¬ 
olution, every generous child of the century has been op: n to 
the fascination of political or social Utopias. But religion ! 

. 'What—what is truth f Why not let the old things alone ? 

However, it was through the social passion, once so real in 
him, and still living, in spite of disillusion and self-mockery, 
that Robert caught him, had in fact been slowly gaining pos¬ 
session of him all these months. 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


621 


Well,” said Flaxman one daj'', “ suppose I grant you that 
Christianity of the old sort shows strong signs of exhaustion, 
even in England, and in spite of the Church expansion we hear 
so much about; and suppose I believe with you that things 
will go badly without religion—what then ? Who can have a 
religion for the asking?” 

“ But who can have it without? /S'eeA;, that you may find. 
Experiment; try new combinations. If a thing is going that 
humanity can’t do without, and you and I believe it, what duty 
is more urgent for us than the effort to replace it ?” 

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders. 

“ What will you gain ? A new sect ? ” 

‘‘ Possibl}". But what Ave stand to gain is a new social bond,” 
was the flashing answer—‘‘ a new compelling force in man and 
in society. Can you deny that the Avorld Avants it ? What are 
you economists and sociologists of the neAV type ahva^^s pining 
for ? Why, for that diminution of the self in man which is to 
enable the individual to see the loorkVs end clearly, and to care 
not onh^ for his own but for his neighbor’s interest, Avhich is to 
make the rich devote themselves to the poor, and the poor bear 
with the rich. If man only loould, he coidd, yow say, solve all 
the problems Avhich oppress him. It is man’s Avill which is 
eternally defective, eternally inadequate. Well, the great re¬ 
ligions of the Avorld are the stimulants by Avhich the poAver at 
the root of things has Avorked upon this sluggish instrument 
of human destiny. Without religion you can not make the 
will equal to its tasks. Our present religion fails us ; Ave 
must, AA'O Avill have another ! ” 

lie rose and began to pace along the sands, now gently gloAV- 
ing in the Avarm September evening, Flaxman beside him. 

A neiG rellgio7i! Of all Avords, the most tremendous ! 
Flaxman pitifully Aveighed against it the fraction of force 
fretting and surging in the thin, elastic frame beside him. lie 
knew Avell, hoAvever—few better—that the outburst AA^as not a 
mere dream and emptiness. There Avas experience behind it— 
a burning, driving experience of actual fact. 

Presentl}^ Robert said, AAdth a change of tone : “ I must 
have that Avhole block of Avarehouses, Flaxman.” 

“Must you?” said Flaxman, relieved by the drop from 
speculation to the practical. “ Why ! ” 

“ Look here ! ” And sitting down again on a sand-hill over¬ 
grown with wild grasses and mats of sea-thistle, the poor, pale 
reformer began to draAV out the details of his scheme on its 
material side. Three floors of rooms brightly furnished, Avell 
lighted and warmed ; a large hall for the Sunday lectures, 


622 


BOBERT ELSMERE. 


concerts, entertainments, and story-telling; rooms for the boys’ 
club ; two rooms for women and girls, reached by a separate 
entrance ; a library and reading-room open to both sexes, well 
stored with books, and made beautiful by j^ictures ; three or 
four smaller rooms to serve as committee rooms and for the 
purposes of the Naturalist Club which had been started in May 
on the Murewell plan ; and, if possible, a gymnasium. 

“ Money /” he said, drawing up with a laugh in mid-career. 
“ There’s the rub, of course. But I shall manage it.” 

To judge from the past, Flaxman thought it extremely 
likely that he would. He studied the cabalistic lines Elsmere’s 
stick had made in the sand for a minute or two ; then he 
said dryly : will take the first expense ; and draw on me 

afterward up to five hundred a year, for the first four years.” 

Robert turned upon him and grasped his hand. 

‘‘ I do not thank you,” he said quietly, after a moment’s 
pause ; “ the work itself will do that.” 

Again they strolled on, talking, plunging into details, till 
Flaxman’s pulse beat as fast as Robert’s ; so full of infectious 
hope and energy was the whole being of the man before him. 

“ I can take in the women and girls now,” Robert said once. 
“ Catherine has promised to superintend it all.” 

Then suddenly something struck the mobile mind, and he 
stood an instant looking at his companion. It was the first 
time he had mentioned Catherine’s name in connection with 

the North R- work. Flaxman could not mistake the 

emotion, the unspoken thanks in those eyes. He turned away, 
nervously knocking off the ashes of his cigar. But the two 
men understood each other. 

CHAPTER XLIX. 

Two days later they were in London again. Robert was a 
great deal better, and beginning to kick against invalid re¬ 
straints. All men have their pet irrationalities. Elsmere’s 
irrationality was an aversion to doctors, from the point of 
view of his own ailments. He had an unbounded admiration 
for them as a class, and would have nothing to say to them as 
individuals that he could possibly help. Flaxman was sar¬ 
castic ; Catherine looked imploring in vain. He vowed that 
he was treating himself with a skill any professional might 
envy, and went his way, and for a time the stimulus of Lon¬ 
don and of his work seemed to act favorabl}^ upon him. After 
his first welcome at the club he came home with bright eye 
and vigorous step, declaring that he was another man. 

Flaxman established himself in St. James’s Place. Town 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 


623 


was deserted ; the partridges at Greenlaws clamored to be 
shot; the head-keeper wrote letters wliich would have melted 
the heart of a stone. Flaxman replied, recklessly, tliat any 
decent fellow in tlie neighborhood was welcome to shoot his 
birds—a reply which almost brought upon liim the resignation 
of the outraged keeper by return of post. Lady Charlotte 
wrote and remonstrated with him for neglecting a land-owner’s 
duties, inquiring at tlie same time what he meant to do witli 
regard to “ that young lady.” To which Flaxman replied 
calmly, that he had just come back from the Lakes, where he 
liad done, not indeed all that he meant to do, but still some¬ 
thing. Miss Leyburn and he were not engaged, but he was 
on probation for six months, and found London the best place 
for getting through it. 

“ So far,” he said, “ I am getting on well, and developing an 
amount of energy especially in the matter of correspondence, 
which alone ought to commend the arrangement to the relations 
of an idle man. But we must be left ‘ to dream our dream unto 
ourselves alone.’ One word from anybody belonging to me to 
anybody belonging to her on the subject, and—But threats 
are puerile. For the present^ dear aunt, I am your devoted 
nephew, Hugh Flaxmaist.” 

“ On probation.^'' 

Flaxman chuckled as he sent off the letter. 

He stayed because he was too restless to be anywhere else,and 
because he loved the Elsmeres for Rose’s sake and his own. 
He thought, moreover, that a cool-headed friend with an eye 
for something else in the world than religious reform might be 
useful just then to Elsmere, and he was determined at the 
same time to see what the reformer meant to be at. 

In the first place, Robert’s attention was directed to getting 
possession of the whole block of buildings, in which the existing 
school and lecture-rooms took up only the lowest floor. This 
was a matter of some difficult}^, for tlie floors above were em¬ 
ployed in warehousing goods belonging to various minor import 
trades, and were held on tenures of different lengths. How- 
over, by dint of some money and much skill, the requisite clear¬ 
ances were effected during September and part of October. 
By the end of that month, all but the top floor, the tenant of 
wliich refused to be dislodged, fell into Elsmere’s hands. 

Meanwhile, at a meeting held every Sunday after lecture—a 
meeting composed mainly of artisans of the district, but includ¬ 
ing also Robert’s helpers from the west,, and a small sprinkling 


624 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


of persons interested in the man and Ins work from all parts— 
the details of “The New Brotherhood of Christ ” were being 
hammered out. Catlierine was generally present, sitting a little 
aj^art, with a look wiiich Flaxman, who now knew her well, was 
always trying to decipher afresh—a sort of sweet aloofness, as 
though the spirit behind it saw, down the vistas of the future, 
ends and solutions which gave it courage to endure the present. 
Murray Edwardes too was always there. It often struck Flax- 
man afterward that in Robei’t’s attitude towai-d Edwardes at 
this time, in his constant desire to bring him forward, to asso¬ 
ciate him with himself as much as possible in the government 
and formation of the infant society, there was a half-conscious 
prescience of a truth that as yet none knew, not even the ten¬ 
der wife, the watchful friend. 

The meetings were of extraordinary interest. The men, the 
great majority of whom had been discipled and molded for 
months by contact with Elsmere’s teaching and Elsmere’s 
thought, showed a responsiveness, a receptivity, even a po^yer 
of initiation which often struck Flaxman with wonder. Were 
these the men he had seen in the club hall on the night of 
Robert’s address—sour, stolid, brutalized, hostile to all things 
in heaven and earth ? 

“ And we go on prating that the age of saints is over, the 
role of the individual lessening day by day ! Fool, go and he 
a saint, go and give yourself to ideas ; go and live the life 
hid with Christ in God, and see ”—so would run the quick 
comment of the observer. 

But incessant as was the reciprocity, the interchange and 
play of feeling between Robert and the wide following growing 
up around him, it was plain to Flaxman that although he never 
moved a step without carrying his world with him, he was 
never at the mercy of his world. Nothing was ever really left 
to chance. Through all these strange debates,which began raw¬ 
ly and clumsily enough, and grew every week more and more 
absorbing to all concerned, Flaxman was convinced that 
hardlj^ any rule or formula of the new society was ultimately 
adopted which had not been for long in Robert’s mind— 
thought out and brought into final shape, perhaps, on the 
Petites Dalles sands. It was an unobstructive art, his art of 
government, but a most effective one. 

At any moment, as Flaxman often felt, at any rate in the 
early meetings, the discussions as to the religious practices 
which were to bind together the new association might have 
passed the line, and become puerile or grotesque. At any mo¬ 
ment the jarring characters and ambittons of the men Elsmere 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


625 


had to deal with might have dispersed that delicate atmos¬ 
phere of moral sympathy and passion in which the whole new 
birth seemed to have been conceived, and upon the main¬ 
tenance of which its fruition and development depended. 
But as soon as Elsmere appeared, difficulties vanished, enthusi¬ 
asm sprang up again. The rules of the new society came sim¬ 
ply and naturally into being steeped and haloed, as it were, 
from the beginning, in the passion and genius of one great heart. 
The fastidious, critical instinct in Flaxnian was silenced no less 
than the sour, half-educated analysis of such a man as Lestrange. 

In the same way all personal jars seemed to melt jjway beside 
him. There were some painful things connected with the new 
departure. Wardlaw, for instance, a conscientious Comtist, 
refusing stoutly to admit anything more than “an unknowable 
reality behind phenomena,” was distressed and affronted by 
the strongly religious bent Elsmere was giving to the work he* 
had begun. Lestrange, who was a man of great though raAV 
ability, who almost always spoke at the meetings, and whom 
Robert was bent on attaching to the society, had times when 
the things he was half-inclined to worship one day he was 
much more inclined to burn the next in the sight of all men, 
and when the smallest failure of temper on Robert’s part 
might have entailed a disagreeable scene and the possible 
formation of an harassing left wing. 

But Robert’s manner to ATardlaw was that of a grateful 
younger brother. It was clear that the Comtist could not 
formally join the Brotherhood. But all the share and in- 
ffuence that could be secured him in the practical working of 
it was secured him. And what was more, Robert succeeded 
in infusing his own delicacy, his own compunctions on the 
subject, into the men and youths who had profited in the past 
by Wardlaw’s rough self-devotion. So that if, through much 
that went on now, he could only be a spectator, at least he 
was not allowed to feel himself an alien or forgotten. 

As to Lestrange, against a man vvdio was as ready to laugh 
as to preach, and into whose ardent soul nature had infused a 
saving sense of the whimsical in life and character, cynicism 
and vanity seemed to have no case. Robert’s quick temper 
had been wonderfully disciplined by life since his Oxford 
days. He had now very little of that stiff-neckedness, so 
fatal to the average reformer, which makes a man insist on 
all or nothing from his followers. He took what each man 
had to give. Ray, he made it almost seem as though the 
grudging support of Lestrange, or the critical, half-patronizing 
approval of the young barrister from the west who came 


626 


ROBEBT ELSMEBE. 


down to listen to him, and made a favor of teaching in hi» 
night-school, were as precious to him as was the whole-hearted, 
the self-abandoning veneration which the majority of those 
about him had begun to show toward the man in whom, as 
Charles Richards said, they had “ seen God.” 

At last by the middle of November the whole great building, 
Avith the exception of the top floor, was cleared and ready for 
use. Robert felt the same joy in it, in its clean paint, the lialf- 
filled shelves in the library, the pictures standing against the 
Avails ready to be hung, the rolls of bright-colored matting 
ready to be laid down, as he had felt in the Murewell Insti¬ 
tute. lid* and Flaxman, helped by a voluntary army of men, 
Avorked at it from morning till night. Only Catherine could 
ever persuade him to remember that he Avas not yet physically 
himself. 

Then came the day when the building was formally opened, 
Avhen the gilt letters over the door, “ The Ncav Brotherhood 
of Christ,” shone out into the ding}^ street, and Avhen the first 
enrollment of names in the book of the Brotherhood took place. 

For tAVO hours a continuous stream of human beings sur¬ 
rounded the little table beside AAdiich Elsmere stood, inscribing 
their names, and receiving from him the sih^er badge, bearing 
the head of Christ, AAddcli Avas to be the outward and con¬ 
spicuous sign of membership. Men came of all sorts : the 
intelligent, Avell-paid artisan, the pallid clerk or small ac¬ 
countant, stalwart Avarehousemen, huge carters and draymen, 
the boy attached to each by the laws of the profession often 
straggling lumpishly behind his master. AVomen Avere there: 
Avives Avho came because their lords came, or because Mr. Els- 
niere had been “ that good ” to them that anything they could 
do to oblige him “they would and welcome”; prim pupil 
teachers, holding themselves with straight, superior shoulders; 
children, Avho came ti’ooping in, grinned up into Robert’s face 
and retreated again Avitli red cheeks, the silver badge tight 
clasped in hands which not even much scrubbing could make 
passable. 

Flaxman stood and watched it from the side. It was an ex¬ 
traordinary scene: the crowd, the slight figure on the platform, 
the tAVO great inscriptions, which represented the only “articles” 
of the new faith, gleaming from the freshly colored walls: 

“In Thee, O Eternal, have I put my trust”; 

“This do in remembrance of Me”; 

—the recesses on either side of the hall lined Avith white marble, 
and destined, the one to hold the names of the living members 


ROBEUT ELISMERE. 


. 627 


tlie Brotherhood, the otlier to commemorate those who had 
])assed away (empty this last save for the one poor name of 
“ Charles Richards ”;) the copies of Giotto’s Paduan Virtues 
—faith, fortitude, charity, and the like—which broke the long 
wall at intervals. The cynic in the on-looker tried to assert 
itself against the feeling with which the air seemed over¬ 
charged. In vain. 

“ Whatevei; comes of it,” Flaxrnan said to himself with 
•strong involuntary conviction, “whether he fails or no, the 
spirit that is moving here is the same spirit that spread the 
church, the spirit that sent out Benedictine and Franciscan into 
the world, that fired the children of Luther, or Calvin, or 
George Fox ; the spirit of devotion, through a man, to an 
idea ; through one much-loved, much-trusted soul to some 
eternal verity; newly caught, newly conceived, behind it. 
There is no approaching the idea for the masses except through 
the human life ; there is no lasting power for the man except 
as the slave of the idea .! ’’ 

A week later he wrote to his aunt as follows. He could not 
write to her of Rose, he did not care to write of himself, and 
he knew that Elsmere’s club address had left a mark even on 
her restless and overcrowded mind. Moreover, he himself 
was absorbed : 

“ We are in the full stream of religion-making. I watch it 
with a fascination j^ou at a distance can not possibly understand, 
even when mj^ judgment demurs, and my intelligence protests- 
that the thing can not live without Elsmere, and that Elsmere’s 
life is a frail one. After the ceremony of enrollment, which I 
described to you yesterday, the Council of the Hew Brother¬ 
hood was chosen by popular election, and Elsmere gave an 
address. Two-thirds of the council, I should think, are work¬ 
ingmen, the rest of the upper class ; Elsmere, of course, 
president. 

“ Since then the first religious service under the new consti¬ 
tution has been held. The service is extremely simple, and 
the basis of the whole is ‘ new bottles for the new wine.’ The 
opening prayer is recited by eveiybody present standing. It 
is rather an act of adoration and faith than a prayer, properly 
so-called. It represents, in fact, the placing of the soul in the 
presence of God. The mortal turns to the eternal; the 
ignorant and imperfect look away from themselves to the 
knowledge and perfection of the All-Holy. It is Elsmere’s 
drawing-up, I imagine—at any rate it is essentially modern, 
expressing the modern spirit, answering to modern need, as I 


C2S 


BOBERT ELSMERE. 


imagine tlie first Christian prayers expressed the spirit and 
answered to tlie need of an earlier day. 

“Tlien follows some passage from the life of Christ. Els- 
mere reads it and expounds it, in the first jdace, as a lecturer 
might expound a passage of Tacitus, historically and critically. 
TTis explanation of miracle, his efforts to make his audience 
I'ealize the germs of miraculous belief which each man carries 
with him in the constitution and inherited furniture of his mind, 
are some of the most ingenious—perhaps the most convinc-’ 
ing—I have ever heard. My heart and my head have never 
been veiy much at one, as you knoAV, on this matter of the 
marvelous element in religion. 

“But then when the critic has done, the poet and the 
believer begins. Whether he has got hold of the true Christ 
is another matter ; but that the Church he preaches moves the 
human heart as much as—and in the case of the London 
artisan, more than—the current orthodox presentation of him, 
I begin to have ocular demonstration. 

“ I was present, for instance, at his children’s Sunday class 
the other day. He had brought them up to the story of the 
crucifixion, reading from the Revised Version, and amplifying 
wherever the sense required it. Suddenly a little girl laid her 
liead on the desk before her, and with choking sobs implored 
liim not to go on. The whole class seemed ready to do the 
same. The pure human pity of the story—the contrast between 
the innocence and the pain of the sufferer—seemed to be more 
than they could bear. And there was no comforting sense of 
a jngglery by which the suffering was not real after all, and 
the sufferer not man but God. 

“ He took one of them upon his knee and tried to console 
them. But there is something piercingly penetrating and 
austere even in the consolations of this new faith. He did 
but remind the children of the burden of gratitude laid upon 
them. ‘Would you let him suffer so much in vain? His 
suffering has made you and me happier and better to-day, at 
this moment, than we could have been without Jesus. You 
will understand how, and why, more clearly when jmu grow 
up. Let us in return keep him in our hearts always, and obey 
his words ! It is all you can do for his sake, just as all j^ou 
could do for a mother who died would be to follow her wishes 
and sacredly keep her memory.’ 

“ That was about the gist of it. It was a strange little 
scene, wonderfully suggestive and pathetic. 

“ But a few more words about the Sunday service. After 
the address came a hymn. There are only seven hymns in the 


ROBERT EhmERK. 


620 


little service-book, gathered out of the finest we have. It is 
supposed that in a sliort time they will become so familiar to 
the members of the Brotherhood that they will be sung readily 
by heart. The singing of them in the public service alternates 
with an equal number of psalms. iVnd both psalms and hymns 
are meant to be recited or sung constantly in the homes of the 
members, and to become part of the eveiy-day life of the 
Brotherliood. '^Jdiey have been most carefully chosen, and a 
sort of ritual im})ortance has been attached to them from the 
beginning. Each day in the week has its particular hymn or 
psalm. 

“ Then the whole Avound up with another short pra3^er, also 
repeated standing, a commendation of the individual, the 
Brotherhood, the nation, the world, to God. The phrases of it 
are terse and grand. One can see at once that it has laid hold 
of the popular sense, the popular memory. The Lord’s PraA^er 
followed. Then, after a silent pause of ‘ recollection,’ Elsmere 
dismissed them. 

“ ‘ G-o in peace, hi the love of God, and in the memory of 
llis servant, Jesus. 

“ I looked carefull}'' at the men as they AA^ere tramping out. 
Some of them Avere among the Secularist speakers Amu and I 
heard at the club in April. In my Avonder I thought of a say¬ 
ing of Yinet’s : ‘ C'^est pour la religion que la peuple a le plus 
de talent ; dest en religion qiCil montre le plus d'’esprit.'* ” 

In a later letter he Avrote : 

“ I have not described to Amu Avhat is perha|>s the most 
characteristic, the most binding practice of the NeAV Brother¬ 
hood. It is what Avhich has raised most angiy comment, cries 
of ‘ profanity,’ ‘ Avanton insult,’ and Avhat not. I came Ti|)on 
it Am^sterday in an interesting Ava3^ I was Avorking Avith Els¬ 
mere at the arrangement of the libraiy, which is noAV becoming 
a most fascinating place, under the management of a librarian 
chosen from the neighborhood, Avhen he asked me to go and 
take a message to a carpenter who has been giving us voluntaiy 
help in the evenings after his daj'^’s Avork. He thought that as it 
Avas the dinner hour, and the man Avorked in the dock close b}^, 
I might hnd him at home. I AAmnt off to the model lodging- 
house Avhere I was told to look for him, mounted the common 
stairs, and knocked at the door. Nobody seemed to hear me, 
and as the door Avas ajar I pushed it open. 

“ Inside Avas a curious sight. The table Avas s])read Avith the 
mid-daA^ meal, a fcAV bloaters, some potatoes, and bread. Round 
the table stood four children, the eldest about fourteen and the 
youngest six or seven. At one end of it stood the carpenter 


630 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


himself in his working apron, a brawny Saxon, bowed a little 
by his trade. Before him was a plate of bread, and his hornj'- 
hands were resting on it. The street was noisy ; they had not 
heard my knock ; and as I pushed open the door there was an 
old coat hanging over the corner of it which concealed me. 

“ Something in the attitudes of all concerned reminded me, 
kept me where I was, silent. 

“ The father lifted his right hand. 

“ ‘ The Master said : “ This do in remembrance of me! ” ’ 

‘‘ The children stooped for a moment in silence, then the 
youngest said, slowly, in a little softened cockney voice that 
touched me extraordinarily : 

“ ‘ Jesus, we remember thee always ! ’ 

It was the appointed response. As she spoke I recollected 
the child perfectly at Elsmere’s class. I also remembered that 
she had no mother ; that her mother had died of cancer in June, 
visited and comforted to the end by Elsmere and his wife. 

“ Well, the great question of course remains—is there a 
sufficient strength of feeling and conviction behind these 
things ? If so, after all, everything Avas new once, and Chris¬ 
tianity was but modified Judaism.” 

“ December 22. 

“ I believe I shall soon be as deep in this matter as Elsmere. 
In Elgood Street great preparations are going on for Christmas. 
But it Avill be a neAV sort of Christmas. We shall hear very lit¬ 
tle, it seems, of angels and shepherds, and a great deal of the 
humble childhood of a little Jewish boy whose genius grown to 
maturity transformed the Western Avorld. To see Elsmere,with 
his boA^s and girls about him, trying to make them feel them¬ 
selves the heirs and fellows of the Nazarene child, to make them 
understand something of the lessons that child must have 
learned, the sights he must have seen, and the thoughts that 
must have come to him, is a spectacle of Avhich I Avill not miss 
more than I can help. Don’t imagine, hoAvever, that I am con- 
A^erted exactly !—but only that I am more interested and stim¬ 
ulated than I have been for years. And don’t expect me for 
Christmas. I shall stay here.” 

‘‘ I^eAv-Year’s day. 

‘‘ I am Avriting from the library of the New Brotherhood. 
The amount of activity, social, educational, religious, of which 
this great building promises to be the center is already aston¬ 
ishing. Everything, of course including the constitution of 
the infant society, is as yet purely tentative and experimental. 
But for a scheme so young, things are falling into Avorking 



ROBERT EL8MEUE. 


631 


order witli wonderful rajjidity. Each department is worked 
by committees under the central council. Elsmere, of course, 
is ex-officio chairman of a lai*ge proportion ; Wardlaw, Mackay, 
I, and a few other fellows ‘ run ’ the rest for the present. But 
each committee contains working-men; and it is the object of 
everybody concerned to make the workman element more and 
more real and efficient. AYhat with the ‘ tax ’ on tlie members 
wliich was lixed by a general meeting, and the contributions 
from outside, the society already commands a fair income. 
But Elsmere is anxious not to attempt too much at once, and 
will go slowly and train his workers. 

“ Music, it seems, is to be a great feature in the future. I 
have ni}^ own projects as to this part of the business, which, 
however, I forbid 3^011 to guess at. 

“ B}^ the rules of tlie Brotlierhood, every member is bound 
to some work in connection with it during the j^ear, but little 
or mucli, as he or she is able. And every meeting, every un¬ 
dertaking of whatever kind, opens witli the special ‘ word ’ or 
formula of the society, “ This do in remembrance of Me.’ ” 

‘Manuaiy 6. 

“ Besides the Sunda}^ lectures, Elsmere is pegging away on 
Saturday evenings at ‘ TlieHistoiy of the Moral Life in Man.’ 
It is a remarkable course, and veiy largely attended by people 
■of all sorts. He tries to make it an exposition of the leading 
principles of the new movement, of ‘ that continuous and only 
.revelation of God in life and nature,’ which is in reality the 
basis of his whole thought. By the way, the letters that are 
pouring in upon him from all parts are extraordinary. They 
^sliow an amount and degree of interest in ideas of the kind 
which are surprising to a Laodicean like me. But he is not 
surprised—says he always expected it—and that there are 
^thousands who only want a rall^dng-point. 

“ His personal effect, the love that is felt for him, the pas- 
■sion and energy of the nature—never has our generation seen 
■■anything to equal it. As you perceive, I am reduced to taking it 
all seriousljq and don’t know what to make of him or myself. 

“ She, poor soul ! is now alwa^’^s with him, comes down with 
him day after day, and works away. She no more believes in 
jhis ideas, I think, than she ever did ; but all her antagonism 
is gone. In the midst of the stir about him her face often 
haunts me. It has changed lately ; she is no longer a young 
woman, but so refined, so spiritual! 

“ But he is ailing and fragile. There is the one cloud on a 
.‘scene tliat fills me with increasing wonder and reverence.” 


632 


ROBERT EL8MERB. 


CHAPTER L. 

One cold Sunday afternoon in January, Flaxman, descend¬ 
ing the steps of the New Brotherhood, was overtaken by a 
young Dr. Edmondson, an able young pliysician, just set up 
for himself as a consultant, who had only lately attached liim- 
self to Elsmere, and was now lielping liim with eagerness to 
organize a dispensary. Young Edmondson and Flaxman ex¬ 
changed a few words on Elsmere’s lecture, and then the 
doctor said abruptly : 

“ I don’t like his looks nor his voice. IIow long has he 
been hoarse like that ? ” 

“ More or less for the last month. He is verj^much worried 
by it himself, and talks of clergyman’s throat. He had a 
touch of it, it appears, once in the country.” 

“ Clergyman’s throat ? ” Edmondson shook his head dubi¬ 
ously. “ It may be. I wish he would let me overhaul him.” 

“ I wish he would ! ” said Flaxman devoutly. “ I wdll see 
what I can do. I will get hold of Mrs. Elsmere.” 

Meanwhile Robert and Catherine had driven home together. 
As they entered the study she caught his hands, a suppressed 
and exquisite passion gleaming in her face. 

“ You did not explain Him ! You never will ! ” 

He stood, held by her, his gaze meeting hers. Then in an 
instant his face changed, blanched before her—he seemed to 
gasp for breath—she was only just able to save him from fall¬ 
ing. It was apparently another swoon of exhaustion. As she 
knelt beside him on the floor, having done for him all she 
couldi watching his return to consciousness, Catherine’s look 
would have terrified any of those who loved her. There are 
some natures which are never blind, never taken blissfully un¬ 
awares, and which taste calamity and grief to the very dregs. 

“ Robert, to-morrow you loill see a doctor ? ” she implored 
him when at last he was safely in bed—white, but smiling. 

He nodded. 

“ Send for Edmondson. What I mind most is this hoarse¬ 
ness,” he said, in a voice that w^as little more than a tremulous 
whisper. 

Catherine hardly closed her eyes all night. The room, the 
house, seemed to her stifling, oppressive, like a grave. And, 
by ill-luck, with the morning came a long-expected letter, not 
indeed from the squire, but about the squire. Robert had been 
for some time ex])ecting a summons to Murewell. The squire 
had written to him last in October from Clarens, on the Lake 
of Geneva. Since then weeks had passed without bringing 


IIOBKUT ELSMERE. 


Elsmere any news of liim at all. jMeanwliile the growth of the 
New Brotherhood had absorbed its founder, so that the in¬ 
quiries which should have been sent to Murewell had been 
postponed. The letter which reached him now was from old 
Meyrick : “ The squire has had another bad attack, and is 

much weaker. But his mind is clear again, and he greatly 
desires to see you. If you can, come to-morrow.” 

“ His mind is clear again ! ” Horrified b}^ the words and 
by the images the^^ called up, remorseful also for his own long 
silence, Robert sprang up from bed, where the letter had been 
brought to him, and presently appeared downstairs, where 
Catherine, believing him safely captive for the morning, was 
going through some household business. 

“ I must go, I must go ! ” he said, as he handed her the letter. 
“ Meyrick puts it cautiously, but it may be the end ! ” 

Catherine looked at him in despair. 

“ Robert, you are like a ghost yourself, and I have sent for 
Doctor Edmondson.” 

“ Put him off till the day after to-morrow. Dear little wife, 
listen : my voice is ever so much better. Murewell air will 
do me good.” She turned away to hide the tears in her eyes. 
Then she ti'ied fresh persuasions, but it was useless. His look 
was glowing and restless. She saw he felt a call impossible 
to disobey. A telegram was sent to Edmondson, and Robert 
drove off to Waterloo. 

Out of the fog of London it was a mild, sunny winter’s day. 
Robert breathed more freely with every mile. His eyes took 
note of every landmark in the familiar journey Avith a thirsty 
eagerness. It Avas a year and a half since he had traveled it. 
He forgot his Aveakness, the exhausting pressure and public¬ 
ity of his new Avmrk. The past possessed him, thrust out the 
present. Surely he had been up to London for the day and 
was going back to Catherine ! 

At the station he hailed an old friend among the cabmen. 

“ Take me to the corner of the Murewell lane, Tom. Then 
you may drive on Avith my bag to the Hall, and I shall Avalk 
over the common.” 

The man urged on his tottering old steed Avith a Avill. In the 
streets of the little tOAvm Robert saAV several acquaintances who 
stopped and stared at the apparition. Were the houses, the 
people real, or Avas it all a hallucination—his flight and his re¬ 
turn, so unthought-of j^esterday, so easy and swift to-day ? 

By the time they AA^ere out on the Avild ground between the 
market town and iMureAA^ell, Robert’s spirits Avere as buoyant 
as thistle-down. He and the driver kept up an incessant gossip 


634 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


over the neighborhood, and he jumped down from the car¬ 
riage as the man stopped, with the alacrity of a bo}^ 

“ Go on, Tom ; see if I am not there as soon as you,” 

‘‘Looks most uncommon bad,” the man muttered to liim- 
self, as his horse shambled off. “ Seems as spry as a lark all 
the same.” 

AYhy, the gorse was out, positivel}" out in January ! and the 
thrushes were singing as though it were March. Robert 
stopped opposite a bush covered with timid half-opened blooms, 
and thought he had seen nothing so beautiful since he had last 
trodden that vv^ay in spring. Presently he was in the same 
cart-track he had crossed on the night of his confession to 
Catherine ; he lingered beside the same solitary hr on the 
brink of the ridge. A winter world lay before him ; soft 
brown woodland, or reddish heath and fern, struck sideways 
by the sun, clothing the earth’s bareness everywhere—curl¬ 
ing mists—blue points of distant hill—a gray luminous depth 
of sky. 

The eyes were moist, the lips moved. There in the place of 
his old anguish he stood and blessed God !—not for au}^ per¬ 
sonal happiness, but simply for that communication of Him¬ 
self which may make every hour of common living a reve¬ 
lation. 

Twenty minutes later, leaving the park gate to his left, he 
hurried up the lane leading to the vicarage. One look ! he 
miglit not be able to leave the squire later. The gate of the 
wood-path was ajar. Surely just inside it he should find Cath¬ 
erine in her garden hat, the white-frocked child dragging be¬ 
hind li'er ! And there was the square stone house, tlie-brown 
corn-field, the red-brown woods ! Whjq what had the man been, 
doing with the study ? White blinds showed it was a bedroom 
now. Vandal! Besides, how could the boys have free access 
except to tliat ground-fioor room ? And all that pretty stretch 
of grass under tlie acacia had been cut up into stiff little lozenge¬ 
shaped beds, filled, he supposed, in summer with the properest 
geraniums. He should never dare to tell that to Catherine. 

He stood and watched the little, significant signs of change 
in this realm, which had been once his own, with a dissatisfied 
mouth, his undermind filled the while with tempestuous yearn¬ 
ing and affection. In that upper room he had lain through that 
agonized night of crisis ; the dawn-twitterings of the summer 
birds seemed to be still in his ears. And there, in the distance, 
was the blue wreath of smoke hanging over Mile End. Ah ! the 
new cottages must be warm this winter. The children did 
not lie in the wet any longer—thank God ! Was there time 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


635 


just to run down to Irwin’s cottage, to have a look at the insti¬ 
tute ? 

lie had been standing on the further side of the road from 
the rectory, that he might not seem to be spying out the land 
and his successor’s ways too closely. Suddenly he found him¬ 
self clinging to a gate near him that led into a field. He was 
shaken by a horrible struggle for breath. The self seemed to 
be foundering in a stifling sea, and fought like a drowning 
thing. When the moment passed, he looked round him bewil¬ 
dered, drawing his hand across his eyes. The world had grown 
black—the sun seemed to be scarcely shining. Were those the 
sounds of children’s voices on the hill, the rumbling of a cart— 
or was it all, sight and sound alike, mirage and delirium ? 

With difficulty, leaning on his stick as though he were a 
man of seventy, he groped his way back to the park. There he 
sank down, still gasping, among the roots of one of the great 
cedars near the gate. After a while the attack passed off and he 
found himself able to walk on. But the joy, the leaping pulse 
of half an hour ago, were gone from his veins. Was that the 
river—the house ? lie looked at them with dull eyes. All the 
light was lowered. A veil seemed to lie between him and the 
familiar things. 

However, by the time he reached the door of the Hall will 
and nature had reasserted themselves, and he knew where he 
was. and what he had to do. 

Vincent flung the door open with his old lordly air. 

“ Wh}'', sir ! 3 fr. Elsmere ! ” 

The butler’s voice began on a note of joyful surprise, sliding 
at once into one of alarm. He stood and stared at this ghost 
of the old rector. 

Elsmere grasped his hand, and asked him to take him into the 
dining-room and give him some wine before announcing 
him. Vincent ministered to him with a long face, pressing all 
the alcoholic resources of the Hall upon him in turn. The 
squire was much better, he declared, and had been carried 
dowm to the library. 

“ But, Lor’, sir, there ain’t much to be said for your looks 
neither—seems as if London didn’t suit you, sir.” 

Elsmere explained feebly that he had been suffering from his 
throat, and had overtired himself by walking over the common. 
Then recognizing, from a distorted vision of himself in a Vene¬ 
tian mirror hanging by, that something of his natural color had 
returned to him, he rose and bade Vincent announce him. 

“ And Mrs. Darcy ? ” he asked, as the^ stepped out into the 
hall again. 


636 


ROBERT ELSMERE, 


Oh, Mrs. I)arcy, sir, she’s very well,” said the man, 
but, as it seemed to Robert, with something of an embar¬ 
rassed air. 

He followed Vincent down the long passage—haunted by 
old memories, by the old sickening sense of mental anguish— 
to the curtained door. Vincent ushered him in. There was a 
stir of feet, and a voice, but at first he saw nothing. The room 
was very much darkened. Then Meyrick emerged into dis¬ 
tinctness. 

“ Squire, here ^6'Mr. Elsmere ! Well, Mr. Elsmere, sir, I’m 
sure we’re very much obliged to you for meeting the squire’s 
wishes so promptly. You’ll find him poorly, Mr. Elsmere, but 
mending—oh, yes, mending, sir—no doubt of it.” 

Elsmere began to perceive a figure by the fire. A bony 
hand was advanced to him out of the gloom. 

“ That’ll do, Meyrick. You won’t be wanted till the even- 

-g” ... 

The imperious note in the voice struck Robert with a sudden 
sense of relief. After all, the squire was still capable of tramp¬ 
ling on Meyrick. 

In another minute the door had closed on the old doctor, and . 
the two men were alone. Robert was beginning to get used 
to the dim light. Out of it the squire’s face gleamSd almost 
as whitely as the tortured marble of the Medusa just above 
their heads. 

“ It’s some infiammatibn in the eyes,” the squire explained 
briefly, “ that’s made Meyrick set up all this d—d business of 
blinds and shutters. I don’t mean to stand it much longer. 
The eyes are better, and I prefer to see my way out of the 
world, if possible.” 

But you are recovering ?” Robert said, laying his hand 
affectionately on the old man’s knee. 

“ I have added to my knowledge,” said the squire dryly. 
“ Like Heine, I am qualified to give lectures in heaven on the 
ignorance of doctors on earth. And I am not in bed, which I 
was last week. For Heaven’s sake don’t ask questions. If 
there is a loathsome subject on earth it is the subject of the 
human body. Well, I suppose my message to you dragged j^ou 
away from a thousand things you had rather be doing. What 
are you so hoarse for ?- Neglecting yourself as usual, for the 
sake of ‘the people,’ who wouldn’t even subscribe to bury 
you ? Have you been working up the Apocrypha as I recom¬ 
mended you last time we met ? ” 

Robert laughed. 

“ For the last four months, squire I have been doing two 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


637 


things with neither of which had you much sympathy in old 
days—holiday-making and ‘ slumming.’ ” 

“ Oh, I remember,” interrupted the squire hastily. “ I was 
low last week, and read the Church papers by way of a coun¬ 
ter-irritant. You have been starting a new religion, I see. A 
new religion ! Humph 

The great head fell forward, and through the dusk Robert 
caught the sarcastic gleam of the e3^es. 

‘‘ You are hardly the man to deny,” he said, undisturbed, 
“ that the old ones laissent d desirer^ 

“ Because there are old abuses, is that any reason why you 
should go and set up a brand-new one—an ugly anachronism 
besides ? ” retorted the squire. “ However, you and I have no 
common ground—never had. I say know, you say/^e/. Where 
is the dilference, after all, between you and any charlatan of 
the lot ? Well, how is Madame de i^etteville ? ” 

“ I have not seen her for six months,” Robert replied, with 
equal abruptness. 

Tlie squire laughed a little under his breath, 

“ What did \"Ou think of her ? ” 

‘‘Very much what you told me to think—intellectually,” 
replied Robert, facing him, but flushing with the readiness of 
ph3^sical delicacy. 

“Well, I certainly never told you to think anything—mor- 
ally,^' said the squire. “The word moral has no relation to 
her. Whom did you see there ? ” 

The catechism Avas naturally most distasteful to its object, 
but Elsmere Avent through Avith it, the squire Avatching him 
for a Avhile Avith an expression Avhich had a spark of malice in 
it. It is not unlikely that some gossip of the Lad 3 ^ Aubrey 
sort had reached him. Elsmere had alwa 3 ^s seemed to him 
oppressively good. The idea that Mine, de Netteville had 
tried her arts upon him was not without its piquancy. 

But Avhile Robert Avas ansAvering a question he Avas aAvare of 
a subtle change in the squire’s attitude—a relaxation of his own 
sense of tension. After a minute he bent forward, peering 
through the darkness. The squire’s head had fallen back, his 
mouth Avas slightl3^ open, and the breath came lightl3q quiver- 
ingly through. The cynic of a moment ago had dropped sud¬ 
denly into a sleep of more than childish weakness and defense¬ 
lessness. 

Robert remained bending forward, gazing at the man who 
had once meant so much to him. 

Strange Avhite face, sunk in the great chair ! Behind it glim¬ 
mered the Donatello figure, and the divine Hermes, a glorious 


638 


nOBEllT EL8MEBE, 


shape in the dusk, looking scorn on human decrepitude. All 
round spread the dim walls of books. The life they had 
nourished was dropping into the abyss out of ken—tliey re¬ 
mained. Sixty years of effort and slavery to end so—a river 
lost in the sands ! 

Old Meyrick stole in again, and stood looking at the sleeping 
squire. 

“ A bad sign ! a bad sign ! ” he said, and shook his head 
mournfully. 

After he had made an effort to take some food which Vin¬ 
cent pressed upon him, Robert, conscious of a stronger physical 
malaise than had ever yet tormented him, was crossing the 
hall again, when he suddenly saw Mrs. Darcy at the door of a 
room which opened into the hall. He went up to her with a 
warm greeting. 

Are you going in to the squire ? Let us go together.” 

She looked at him with no surprise, as though she had seen 
him the day before, and as he spoke she retreated a step into 
the room behind her, a curious film, so it seemed to him, dark¬ 
ening her small gray eyes. 

“ The squire is not here. He is gone away. Have you seen 
my white mice ? Oh, they are such darlings ! Only, one of 
them is ill, and the}^ won’t let me have the doctor.” 

Her voice sank into the most pitiful plaintiveness. She 
stood in the middle of the room, pointing with an elfish finger 
to a large cage of Avhite mice which stood in the window. The 
room seemed full, besides, of other creatures. Robert stood 
rooted, looking at the tiny withered figure in the black dress, 
its snowy hair and diminutive face swathed in lace, with a per¬ 
plexity into Avhich there slipped an involuntary shiver. Sud¬ 
denly he became aware of a woman by the fire, a decent, strong¬ 
looking body in gray, who rose as his look turned to her. Their 
eyes met; her expression and the little jerk of her head toward 
Mrs. Darcy, Avho was now standing by the cage coaxing the 
mice with the weirdest gestures, were enough. Robert turned, 
and Avent out sick at heart. The careful, exquisite beauty of the 
great hall struck him as something mocking and anti-human. 

No one else in the house said a Avord to him of Mrs. Darc}^ 
In the evening the squire talked much at intervals, but in an¬ 
other key. He insisted on a certain amount of light, and, 
leaning on Robert’s arm, went feebly round the book-shelves. 
He took out one of the volumes of the Fathers that NeAvman 
had given him. 

“ When I think of the hours I wasted over this barbarous 
rubbish,” he said, his blanched fingers turning the leaves vin- 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


G39 


dictively, “ and of the other hours I maundered away in serv¬ 
ices and self-examination ! Thank Heaven, however, the germ 
of revolt and sanity was always there. And when once I got 
to it, I learned my lesson pretty quick.” 

Robert paused, his kind, inquiring eyes looking down on the 
shrunken squire. 

“ Oh, not one you have any chance of learning, my good 
friend,” said the other aggressively. ‘‘And after all it’s sim¬ 
ple. Go to your grave with your eyes open —that’s all. But 
men don’t learn it, somehow. Newman was incapable—so are 
you. All the religions are nothing but so many vulgar 
anaesthetics, which only the few have courage to refuse.” 

“ Do you want me to contradict you ? ” said Robert, smil¬ 
ing ; “I am quite ready.” 

The squire took no notice. Presently, when he was in his 
chair again, he said abruptly, pointing to a mahogany bureau 
in the window, “ The book is all there—both parts, first and 
second. Publish it if you please. If not, throw it into the 
fire. Both are equally indifferent to me. It has done its 
work ; it has helped me through half a century of living.” 

“ It shall be to me a sacred trust,” said Elsmere, with emo¬ 
tion. “ Of course if you don’t publish it, I shall publish it.” 

“ As you please. Well, then, if you have nothing more ra¬ 
tional to tell me about, tell me of this ridiculous Brotherhood 
of yours.” 

Robert, so adjured, began to talk, but with difficulty. The 
words would not flow, and it was almost a relief when in the 
middle that strange creeping sleep overtook the squire again. 

JMeyrick, who was staying in the house, and who had been 
coming in and out through the evening, eying Elsmere, now 
that there was more light on the scene, with almost as much 
anxiety and misgiving as the squire, was summoned. The 
squire was put into his carrying-chair. Vincent and a male at¬ 
tendant appeared, and he was borne to his room, Meyrick per¬ 
emptorily refusing to allow Robert to lend so much as a finger 
.to the performance. They took him up the libraiy stairs, 
through the empty book-rooms and that dreary room which 
had been his father’s, and so into his own. By the time they 
set him down he was quite awake and conscious again. 

“ It can’t be said that I follow my own precepts,” he said 
to Robert grimly, as they put him down. “ Not much of the 
open eye about this. I shall sleep m5"self into the unknown as 
sweetly as any saint in the calendar.” 

Robert was going when the squire called him back, 

“ You’ll stay to-morrow, Elsmere ?” 


640 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


“ Of course, if you wish it.” 

The wrinkled eyes fixed him intently. 

“ Why did you ever go ? ” 

“ As I told you before, squire, because there was nothing 
else for an honest man to do.” 

The squire turned round with a frown. 

What the deuce are you dawdling about, Benson ? Give 
me my stick and get me out of this.” 

By midnight all was still in the vast pile of Murewell. Out¬ 
side, the night was slightly frosty. A clear moon shone over 
the sloping reaches of the park ; the trees shone silverly in the 
cold light, their black shadows cast along the grass. Robert 
found himself quartered in the Stuart room, where James II. 
had slept, and where the tartan hangings of the ponderous 
carved bed, and the rose and thistle reliefs of the walls and 
ceilings, untouched for two hundred years, bore witness to the 
loyal preparations made by some by-gone Wendover. He was 
mortally tired, but by way of distracting his thoughts a little 
from the squire, and that other tragedy which the great house 
sheltered somewhere in its walls, he took from his coat pocket 
a French “ Anthologie ” which had been Catherine’s birthday 
gift to him, and read a little before he fell asleep. 

Then he slept profoundly—the sleep of exhaustion. Sud¬ 
denly he found himself sitting up in bed, his heart beating to 
suffocation, strange noises in his ears. 

A cry “ Help ! ” resounded through the wide, empty 
galleries. 

He flung on his dressing-gown, and ran out in the direction 
of the squire’s room. 

The hideous cries and scuffling grew more apparent as he 
reached it. At that moment Benson, the man who had helped 
to carry the squire, ran up. 

“ My God, sir ! ” he said, deathly white, “ another attack ! ” 

The squire’s room was empty, but the door into the lumber- 
room adjoining it was open, and the stifled sounds came 
through it. 

They rushed in and found Meyrick struggling in the grip of 
a white figure, that seemed to have the face of a fiend and the 
grip of a tiger. Those old bloodshot eyes—those wrinkled 
hands on the throat of the doctor—horrible ! 

They released poor Me3n-ick, who staggered, bleeding, into 
the squire’s room. Then Robert and Benson got the squire 
back by main force. The whole face was convulsed, the poor, 
shrunken limbs rigid as iron. Meyrick, who was sitting gasp¬ 
ing, by a superhuman effort of will mastered himself enough 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


G41 


to give directions for a strong opiate. Benson managed to 
control the madman while Robert found it. Then between 
them they got it swallowed. 

But nature liad been too quick for them. Before the opiate 
could have had time to work, the squire shrank together like 
a puppet of which the threads are loosened, and fell heavily 
sideways out of his captor’s hands on to the bed. They laid 
him there, tenderly covering him from the January cold. The 
swollen eyelids fell, leaving just a thread of white visible un¬ 
derneath; the clinched hands slowly relaxed; the loud breath¬ 
ing seemed to be the breathing of deatli. 

Meyrick, whose wound on the head had been hastily bound 
up, threw himself beside the bed. The night-light bej^ond 
cast a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, emphasizing, as 
though in mockery, the long, straight back, the ragged whisk¬ 
ers, the strange ends and horns of the bandage. But the pas¬ 
sion in the old face was as purely tragic as any that ever spoke 
through the lips of an Antigone or a Gloucester. 

The last—the last! ” he said, choked, the tears falling 
down his lined cheeks on to the squire’s hand. “ He can 
never rally from this. And I was fool enough to think yes¬ 
terday I had pulled him through ! ” 

Again a long gaze of inarticulate grief ; then he looked up 
at Robert. 

“ He wouldn’t have Benson to-night. I slept in the next 
room with the door ajar. A few moments ago I heard him 
moving. I was up in an instant, and found him standing by 
that door, peering through, barefooted, a wind like ice 
coming up. He looked at me, frowning, all in a flame. 
‘ My father he said —^ my father —he went that way—what 
do 2/ow want here ? Keep back ! ’ I threw myself on him; he 
had something sharp which scratched me on the temple; I 
got that away from him, but it was his hands”—and the old 
man shuddered. “ I thought they would have done for me 
before any one could hear, and that then he would kill himself 
as his father did.” 

Again he hung over the figure on the bed—his own withered 
hand stroking that of the s*quire with a yearning affection. 

“ When was the last attack ? ” asked Robert sadly. 

“ A month ago, sir, just after they got back. Ah, Mr. 
Elsmere, he suffered. And he’s been so lonely. No one to 
cheer him, no one to please him with his food—to put his 
cushions right—to coax him up a bit, and that—and his poor 
sister too, always there before his eyes. Of course he would 
stand to it he liked to be alone. But I’ll never believe men 


642 


ROBERT EL8MERE. 


are made so unlike one to the other. The Almighty meant 
a man to have a wife and child about him wdien he comes 
to the last. He missed you, sir, when you went away. Not 
that he’d say a word, but he moped. His books didn’t seem 
to please him, nor anything else. I’ve just broke my heart 
over him this last year.” 

There was silence a moment in the big room, hung round 
with the shapes of by-gone Wendovers. The opiate had taken 
effect. The squire’s countenance was no longer convulsed. 
The great brow was calm ; a more than common dignity and 
peace spoke from the long, peaked face. Robert b^ent over 
him. The madman, the cynic, had passed away : the dying 
scholar and thinker lay before him. 

“ Will he rally ? ” he asked, under his breath. 

Meyrick shook his head. 

“ I doubt it. It has exhausted all the strength he had 
left. The heart is failing rapidly. I think he will sleep away. 
And, Mr. Elsmere, you go—go and sleep. Benson and I’ll 
watch. Oh, my scratch is nothing, sir. I’m used to a rough- 
and-tumble life. But you go. If there’s a change we’ll wake 
you.” 

Elsmere bent down and kissed the squire’s forehead ten¬ 
derly, as a son might have done. By this time he himself 
could hardly stand. He crept away to his own room, his 
nerves still quivering with the terror of that sudden waking, 
the horror of that struggle. 

It was impossible to sleep. The moon was at the full outside. 

He drew back the curtains, made up the fire, and, wrapping 
himself in a fur coat which Flaxman had lately forced upon 
him, sat where he could see the moonlighted park, and still be 
within the range of the blaze. 

As the excitement passed away a reaction of feverish weak¬ 
ness set in. The strangest whirlwind of thoughts fled through 
him in the darkness, suggested very often by the figures on 
the seventeenth-century tapestry which lined the walls. Were 
those the trees in the wood-path ? Surely that was Catherine’s 
figure, trailing—and that dome—strange ! Was he still walk¬ 
ing in Grey’s funeral procession, the Oxford buildings looking 
sadly down ? Death here ! Death there ! Death everywhere, 
yawning under life from the beginning ! The veil which 
hides the common abyss, in sight of which men could not 
always hide themselves and live, is rent asunder, and he looks, 
shuddering, into it. 

Then the image changed, and in its stead that old familiar 
image of the River of Deatli took possession of him. He stood 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


643 


himself on the brink ; on the other side were Grey and the 
squire. But he felt no pang of separation, of pain ; for he 
himself was just about to cross and join them ! And during 
a strange, brief lull of feeling the mind harbored image and 
expectation alike with perfect calm. 

Theif\he fever-spell bi’oke—the brain cleared—and he was 
terribl}^ himself again. Whence came it—this fresh, inexora¬ 
ble consciousness? He tried to repel it, to forget himself, to 
cling blindly, without thought, to God’s love and Catherine’s. 
But the anguish mounted fast. On the one hand, this fast¬ 
growing certainty, urging and penetrating though every nerve 
and liber of the shaken frame ; on the other, the ideal fabric of 
his efforts and his dreams, the New Jerusalem of a regenerate 
faith ; the poor, the loving, and the simple walking therein ! 

“ Jiy God! my God! no time ^ no future !''' 

In his misery he moved to the uncovered window, and stood 
looking through it, seeing and not seeing. Outside, the river, 
just filmed with ice, shone under the moon ; over it bent the 
trees, laden with hoar-frost. Was that a heron, rising for an 
instant, beyond the bridge, in the unearthly blue ? 

And quietly—heavily—like an irrevocable sentence, there 
came, breathed to him as it were from that winter cold and 
loneliness, words that he had read an hour or two before in 
the little red book beside his hand—words in which the gayest 
of French poets has fixed, as though by accident, the most 
tragic of all human cries : 

“ Quittez le long espoir, et les vastes pensees.” 

He sank on his knees, wrestling with himself and with the 
bitter longing for life, and the same words rang through him, 
deafening every cry but their own : 

“ Quittez — quittez—le long espoir et les vastes pensees ! ” 
CHAPTER LI. 

There is little more to tell. The man who had lived so 
fast was no long time dying. The eager soul was swift in 
this as in all else. 

The day after Elsmere’s return to Murewell, where he left the 
squire still alive (the telegram announcing the death reached 
Bedford Square a few hours after Robert’s arrival), Edmondson 
came up to see him and examine him. He discovered tuber¬ 
cular disease of the larynx, which begins with slight hoarseness 
and weakness, and develops into one of the most rapid forms of 
phthisis. In his opinion it had been originally set up by the 


644 


ROBERT ELSMERB. 


effects of tlie cliill at Petites Dalles acting upon a constitiitioil 
never strong, and at that nionient peculiarly susceptible’to mis¬ 
chief. And of course the speaking and preaching of the last 
four months had done enormous harm. 

It was with great outward composure that Elsmere received 
his arret de mort at the hands of the young doctor, who an¬ 
nounced the result of his examination with a hesitating lij) and 
a voice which struggled in vain to pi-eserve its professional 
calm. He knew too much of medicine himself to be deceived 
by Edmondson’s optimist remarks as to the possible effect of a 
warm climate like Algiers on his condition. He sat down, rest¬ 
ing his head on his hands a moment; then, wringing Edmond¬ 
son’s hand, he went out feebly to find his wife. 

Catherine had been waiting in the dining-room, her whole 
soul one dry, tense misery. She stood looking out of the win¬ 
dow taking curious heed of a Jewish wedding that was going 
on ill the square, of the preposterous bouquets of the coachman 
and the gaping circle of errand-boys. How pinched the bride 
looked in the north wind ! 

When the door opened and Catherine saw her husband come 
in—her young husband, to whom she had been married not 
yet four years—with that indescribable look in the eyes which 
seemed to divine and confirm all those terrors which had been 
shaking her during her agonized waiting, there followed a mo¬ 
ment between them which words can not render. When it 
ended—that half-articulate convulsion of love and anguish— 
she found herself sitting on the sofa beside him, his head on 
her breast, his hand clasping hers- 

“ Do you wish me to go, Catherine ? ” he asked her gently— 
“ to Algiers ? ” 

Her eyes implored for her. 

‘‘ Then I will,” he said, but with a long sigh. “It will only 
prolong it two months,” he thought; “ and does one not owe it 
to the people for whom one has tried to live, to make a brave 
end among them ? Ah, no ! no ! those two months are hers ! ” 

So, without any outward resistance, he let the necessary 
preparations be made. It wrung his heart to go, but he could 
not wring hers by staying. 

After his interview with Robert, and his further interview 
with Catherine, to whom he gave the most minute recom¬ 
mendations and directions, with a reverent gentleness which 
seemed to make the true state of the case more ghastly plain 
to the wife than ever, Edmondson went off to Flaxman. 

Flaxman heard the news with horror. 

“ A had case, you say—advanced ? ” 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


645 


A bad case ! ” Edmondson repeated gloomily. “ He has 
been tigliting against it too long under that absurd delusion of 
clergyman’s throat. If only men would not insist upon being 
their own doctors ! And, of course, that going down to Mure- 
well the other day was madness. I shall go with him to Al-. 
giers, and probably stay a week or two. To think of that life, 
tliat career, cut short ! This is a queer sort of world ! ” 

When Flaxman went over to Bedford Square in the after¬ 
noon, he went like a man going himself to execution. In the 
hall he met Catherine. 

“ You have seen Dr. Edmondson ? ’’ she asked, pale and still, 
except for a little nervous quivering of the lip. 

He stooped and kissed her hand. 

“ Yes. He says he goes with you to Algiers. I will come 
after if you will have me. The climate may do wonders.” 

She looked at him with the most heart-rending of smiles. 

“ Will you go in to Robert? He is in the study.” 

He went in trepidation, and found Robert lying tucked up 
on the sofa, apparently reading. 

“ Don’t—don’t, old fellow,” he said affectionately, as Flax- 
man almost broke down. “ It comes to all of us sooner or 
later. AYhenever it comes we think it too soon. I believe I 
have been sure of it for some time. We are such strange 
creatures ! It has been so present to me lately that life was 
too good to last. You remember the sort of feeling one used 
to have as a child about some treat in the distance—that it 
Avas too much joy—that something Avas sure to come betAveen 
3^011 and it? Well, in a sense, I have had my joy, the first 
fruits of it at least.” 

But as he threw his arms behind his head, leaning back on 
them, Flaxman saAV the ayes darken and the na’ive boyish 
mouth contract, and kncAV that under all these brave Avords 
there was a heart Avhich liungered. 

“ How strange ! ” Robert Avent on reflectively, “ yesterday I 
Avas traveling, walking like other men, a member of society. 
To-day I am an invalid ; in the true sense, a man no longer. 
The A\mrld has done with me ; a barrier I shall never recross 
lias sprung up betAA^een me and it. Flaxman, to-night is the 
story-telling. Will you read to them ? I have the book here 
prepared—some scenes from ‘ David Copperfield.’ And you 
Avill tell them ? ” 

A hard task, but Flaxman undertook it. Never did he for- 
•get the scene. Some ominous rumor had spread, and the New 
Brotherhood Avas besieged. Impossible to give the reading. 
A hall full of strained, upturned faces listened to Flaxman’s 


646 


ROBERT ELEMKRE. 


announcement, and to Klsmere’s messages of cheer and exhor¬ 
tation, and then a wild wave of grief spread tlirough tlie place. 
The street outside was blocked, men looking dismally into each 
other’s eyes, women weeping, children sobbing for sympathy, 
all feeling themselves at once shelterless and forsaken. When 
Elsmere heard the news of it he turned on his face, and asked 
even Catherine to leave him for awhile. 

The preparations were pushed on. The New Brotherhood 
had just become the subject of an animated discussion in the 
])ress, and London was touched by the news of its young 
founder’s breakdown. Catherine found herself besieged by 
offers of help of various kinds. One offer Flaxnian persuaded 
her to accept. It was the loan of a villa at El Biar, on the hill 
above Algiers, belonging to a connection of his own. A resi¬ 
dent on the spot was to take all trouble off their hands ; 
they were to find servants ready for them, and every 
comfort. 

Catherine made every arrangement, met every kindness, 
with a self-reliant calm that never failed. But it seemed to 
Flaxman that her heart was broken—that half of her, in feel¬ 
ing, was already on the other side of this horror which stared 
them all in the face. Was it his perception of it which stirred 
Robert after awhile to a greater hopefulness of speech, a con¬ 
stant bright dwelling on the flowery sunshine for which they 
were about to exchange the fog and cold of London ? The mo¬ 
mentary revival of energy was more pitiful to Flaxman than 
liis first quiet resignation. 

He himself wrote every day to Rose. Strange love-letters! 
in which the feeling that could not be avowed ran as a fiery 
undercurrent through all the sad brotherly record of the in¬ 
valid’s doings and prospects. There was deep trouble in Long 
Whindale. Mrs. Leyburn was tearful and hysterical, and 
wished to rush off to town to see Catherine. Agnes wrote in 
distress that her mother was quite unfit to travel, showing her 
own inner conviction, too, that the poor thing would only be 
an extra burden on the Elsmeres if the journey was achieved. 
Rose wrote asking to be allowed to go with them to Algiers ; 
and after a little consultation it was so arranged, Mrs. Ley- 
burn being tenderly persuaded, Robert himself writing, to stay 
where she was. 

The morning after the interview with Edmondson, Robert 
sent for Murray Edwardes. Tliey were closeted together for 
nearly an hour. ^ Edwardes came out with a look of one who 
has been lifted into “ heavenly places.” “ I thank God,” he 
said to Catherine^ with deep emotion, “ that I ever knew him. 


ROBERT KL8MERE. 


C47 


I pray that I may be found worthy to carry out my pledges 
to him.” 

When Catherine went into the study she found Robert gaz¬ 
ing into the fire with dreamy eyes. He started and looked up 
to her with a smile. 

“ Murray Edwardes has promised himself heart and soul to 
the work. If necessary, he will give up his chapel to carry it 
on. But we hope it will be possible to work them together. 
What a brick he is ! What a blessed chance it was that took 
me to that breakfast-party at Flaxman’s ! ” 

The rest of the time before departure he spent almost en¬ 
tirely in consultation and arrangement with Edwardes. It 
was terrible how raj^idly worse he seemed to grow directly the 
situation had declared itself, and the determination not to be 
ill had been perforce overthrown. But his struggle against 
breathlessness and weakness, and all the other symptoms of 
his state during these last days, was heroic. On the last day 
of all, by his own persistent wish, a certain number of mem¬ 
bers of the Brotherhood came to say good-by to him. They 
came in one by one, Macdonald first. The old Scotchman, 
from the height of his sixty years of tough, weather-beaten 
manhood, looked down on Robert with a fatherly concern. 

“ Eh, Mister Elsmere, but it’s a fine place yur gawin’ tu, 
they say. Ye’ll do weel there, sir—ye’ll do week And as for 
the wark, sir, we’ll keep it oop—we’ll not let the deil mak’ 
hay o’ it, if we knaws it—the auld leer ! ” he added, with a 
phraseology which did more honor to the Calvinism of his 
blood than the philosophy of his training. 

Lestrange came in, with a pale, sharp face, and said little in 
his ten minutes. But Robert divined in him a sort of repressed 
curiosity and excitement akin to that of Voltaire turning his 
feverish eyes toward le grande secret. “ You, who preached to 
us that consciousness, and God, and the soul are the only real¬ 
ities—are you so sure of it now you are dying, as you were 
in health ? Are your courage, your certainty, what they 
were ? ” These were the sort of questions that seemed to 
underlie the man’s spoken words. 

There was something trying in it, but Robert did his best 
to put aside his consciousness of it. He thanked him for his 
help in the past, and implored him to stand by the young 
society and Mr. Edwardes. 

“ I shall hardly come back, Lestrange. But what does one 
man matter? One soldier falls, another presses forward.” 

The watchmaker rose, then paused a moment, a flush pass¬ 
ing over him. 


648 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


‘‘We can’t stand without you!” he said abruptly ; then, 
seeing Robert’s look of distress, he seemed to cast about for 
soihething reassuring to say, but could find nothing. Robert 
at last held out his hand with a smile, and he went. He left 
Elsmere struggling with a pang of horrible depression. In 
reality there was no man who worked harder at the Kew 
Brotherhood during the months that followed than Lestrango. 
He worked under perpetual protest from the frondeur within 
him, but something stung him on—on—till a habit had been 
formed which promises to be the joy and salvation of his 
later life. Was it the haunting memory of that thin figure— 
the hand clinging to the chair—the white appealing look ? 

Others came and Avent, till Catherine trembled for the con¬ 
sequences. She herself took in IVIrs. Richards and her children, 
comforting the sobbing creatures afterward with a calmness 
born of her own desj^air. Robson, in the last stage himself, 
sent him a grimly characteristic message. “ I shall solve the 
riddle, sir, before you. The doctor gives me three days. For 
the first time in my life I shall knoAv Avhat you are still guess¬ 
ing at. Ma}'' the blessing of one who never blessed thing or 
creature before he saw you go with a^ou 1 ” 

After it all Robert sank on the sofa Avith a groan. 

“ No more ! ” he said hoarsely—“ no more ! Now for air— 
the sea ! To-morroAv, Avife, to-morroAv ! Gras ingens iterahi- 
mus cequor. Ah, me ! I leave my new Salamis behind ! ” 

But on that last evening he insisted on Avriting letters to 
Langham and NeAVCome. 

“ I will spare Langham the sight of me,” he said, smiling 
sadly. “ And I will spare myself the sight of NeAvcome—I 
could not bear it, I think. But I must say good-by—for I 
love them both.” 

Next day, tAVO hours after the Elsmeres had left for Dover, 
a cab drove up to their house in ]3edford Square, and New- 
come descended from it. “ Gone, sir, tAVO hours ago,” said 
the house-maid, and the priest turned away Avith an iiiA^olun- 
tary gesture of despair. To his dying day the passionate 
heart bore the burden of that “ too late,” believing that even 
at the eleventh hour Elsmere Avould have been granted to his 
pra 3 ^ers. He might even have followed them, but that a great 
retreat for clergy he Avas just on the point of conducting 
made it impossible. 

Flaxman Avent doAvn Avith them to Dover. Rose, in the 
midst of all her new and Avomanly care for her sister and 
Robert, Avas very SAveet to him. In any other circumstances, 
he told himself, he could easily have broken doAvn the flimsy 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


649 


ban-ier between them, but in those last twenty-four hours he 
could press no claim of his own. 

When the steamer cast loose, the girl, hanging over the 
side, stood watching the tall figure on the pier against the 
gray January sky. Catherine caught her look and attitude, 
and could have cried aloud in her own gnawing pain. 

Flaxman got a cheery letter from Edmondson describing 
their arrival. Their journey had gone well ; even the odious 
passage from Marseilles had been tolerable ; little Mary had 
proved a model traveler ; the villa was luxurious, the weather 
good. 

I have got rooms close by them in the vice-consul’s cot¬ 
tage,” wrote Edmondson. “ Imagine,* within sixty hours of 
leaving London in a January fog, finding yourself tramping 
over wild marigolds and mignonette, under a sky and through 
an air as balmy as those of an English June—when an English 
June behaves itself. Pllsmere’s room overlooks the bay, the 
great plain of the Metidja dotted with villages, and the grand 
range of the Djurjura, backed by snowy summits one can 
hardly tell from the clouds. Ilis spirits are marvelous. He is 
plunged in the history of Algiers, raving about one Fromentin, 
learning Spanish even ! The Avonderful purity and warmth of 
the air seem to have relieved the larynx greatly. He breathes 
and speaks much more easily than when Ave left London. I 
sometimes feel Avhen I look at him as though in this as in all 
else he were unlike the common sons of men—as though to 
him it might be possible to subdue even this fell disease.” 

Elsmere himself wrote : 

“ ‘ I had not heard the half ’—O Flaxman ! An enchanted 
land—air, sun, Avarmth, roses, orange-blossoms, ncAV potatoes, 
green pease, veiled Eastern beauties, domed mosques and 
preaching malidis—everything that feeds the outer and the 
inner man. To throAV the Avindow open at waking to the depth 
of sunlighted air betAveen us and the curve of the bay, is for 
the moment heaven ! One’s soul seems to escape one, to pour 
itself into the luminous blue of the morning. I am better—I 
breathe again. 

“ Mary flourishes exceedingly. She lives mostly on oranges, 
and has been adopted by sixty nuns Avho inhabit the convent 
over the way, and sell us the most delicious butter and cream. 
I imagine, if she were a trifle older, her mother would hardly 
view the proceedings of these dear be-rosaried Avomen Avith so 
much equanimity. 

‘‘ As to Rose, she Avrites more letters than Clarissa, and re¬ 
ceives more than an editor of the Times. I have the strong- 


650 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


est views, as you know, as to the vanity of letter-writing. 
There was a time when you shared them, but there are cir¬ 
cumstances and conjunctures, alas ! in which no man can be 
sure of his friend or his friend’s principles. Kind friend, good 
fellow, go often to Elgood Street. Tell me everything about 
everybody. It is possible, after all, that I may live to come 
back to them.” 

But a week later, alas ! the letters fell into a very different 
strain. The weather had changed, had turned indeed damp 
and rainy, the natives of course declaring that such gloom and 
storm in January had never been known before. Edmondson 
wrote in discouragement. Elsmere had had a touch of cold, 
had been confined to bed, and almost speechless. His letter 
was full of medical detail, from which Flaxman gathered that, 
in spite of the rally of the first ten days, it was clear that the 
disease was attacking constantly fresh tissue. “ He is veiy 
depressed, too,” said Edmondson ; “ I have never seen him so 
yet. He sits and looks at us in the evening sometimes with 
eyes that wring one’s heart. It is as though, after having for 
a moment allowed himself to hope, he found it a doubly hard 
task to submit.” 

Ah, that depression ! It was the last eclipse through which 
a radiant soul was called to pass : but while it lasted it was 
black indeed. The implacable reality, obscured at first by 
the emotion and excitement of farewells, and then by a brief 
spring of hope and returning vigor, showed itself now in all 
its stern nakedness—sat down, as it were, eye to eye with Els¬ 
mere—immovable, ineluctable. There were certain features of 
the disease itself which were specially trying to such a nature. 
The long silences it enforced were so unlike him, seemed already 
to withdraw him so pitifully from their yearning grasp ! In 
these dark days he would sit crouching over the wood-fire in 
the little salon, or lie drawn to the window looking out on the 
rain-storm bowing the ilexes or scattering the meshes of cle¬ 
matis, silent, almost always gentle, but turning sometimes on 
Catherine, or on Mary playing at his feet, eyes which, as 
Edmondson said, “ wrung the heart.” 

But in reality, under the husband’s depression, and under 
the wife’s inexhaustible devotion, a combat was going on, 
which reached no third person, but was throughout poignant 
and tragic to the highest degree. Catherine was making her 
last effort, Robert his last stand. As we know, ever since that 
passionate submission of the wife which had thrown her mor¬ 
ally at her husband’s feet, there had lingered at the bottom of 
her heart one last supreme hope. All persons of the older 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


651 


Christian type attribute a special importance to the moment of 
death. While the man of science looks forward to his last 
hour as a moment of certain intellectual weakness, and calmly 
warns his friends beforehand that he is to be judged by the 
utterances of health and not by those of physical collapse, the 
Christian believes that on the confines of eternity the veil of 
flesh shrouding the soul grows thin and transparent, and that 
the glories and the truths of heaven are visible witli a special 
clearness and authority to the dying. It was for this moment, 
either in herself or in him, that Catherine’s unconquerable 
faith had been patiently and dumbly waiting. Either she 
would go first, and death would wing her poor last words to 
him with a magic and power not their own ; or, when he came 
to leave her, the veil of doubt would fall away perforce from a 
spirit as pure as it was humble, and the eternal light, the light 
of the Crucified, shine through. 

Probably, if there had been no breach in Robert’s serenity, 
Catherine’s poor last effort would have been much feebler, 
briefer, more hesitating. But when she saw him plunged for 
a sliort space in mortal discouragement, in a somberness that 
as tlie days went on had its points and crests of feverish irrita¬ 
tion, her anguisheci pity came to the help of her creed. Robert 
felt himself besieged, driven within the citadel, her being urg¬ 
ing, grappling with his. In little half-articulate words and 
ways, in her attempts to draw him back to some of their old 
religious books and prayers, in those kneeling vigils he often 
found her maintaining at night beside him, he felt a persistent 
attack which nearly—in his weakness—overthrew him. 

For reason and thought grow tired like muscles and nerves. 
Some of the greatest and most daring thinkers of the world 
have felt this pitiful longing to be at one with those who love 
them, at whatever cost, before the last farewell. And the 
simpler Christian faith has still to create around it those ven¬ 
erable associations and habits which buttress individual fee¬ 
bleness and diminish the individual effort. 

One early February morning, just before dawn, Robert 
stretched out his hand for his wife, and found her kneeling 
beside him. The dim, mingled light showed him her face 
vaguely—her clasped hands, her eyes. He looked at her in 
silence, she at him ; there seemed to be a strange shock as of 
battle between them. Then he drew her head down to him. 

“ Catherine,” he said to her, in a feeble, intense whisper, 
“ would you leave me without comfort, without help, at the 
end?” 

“ Oh, my beloved! ” she cried, under her breath, throwing 


652 


liOBEllT ELSMEim 


her arms round him, “ if you would but stretch out your hand 
to the true comfort—the true help—the Lamb of Godsacriticed 
for us ! ” 

He stroked her hair tenderly. 

“ My weakness might yield—my true best self never. I 
know Whom I have believed. Oh, my darling, be content. 
Your misery, your prayers hold me back from God—from that 
truth and that trust which can alone be honestly mine. Submit, 
my wife ! Leave me in God’s hands.” 

She raised her head. Ills eyes were bright with fever, his 
lips trembling, his whole look heavenly. She bowed herself 
again with a quiet burst of tears, and an indescribable self- 
abasement. They had had their last struggle, and once moi’e 
he had conquered. Afterward the cloud lifted from him. 
Depression and irritation disappeared. It seemed to her olteii 
as though he lay already on the breast of God ; even her wifely, 
love grew timid and awestruck. 

Yet he did not talk much of immortality, of reunion. It 
was like a scrupulous child that dares not take for granted 
more than its father has allowed it to know. At the same 
time, it was plain to those about him that the only realities to 
him in a world of shadows were God—love—the soul. 

One day he suddenly caught Catherine’s hands, drew her 
face to him, and studied it with his glowing and hollow eyes, 
as though he would draw it into his soul. 

“ He made it ” he said hoarsely, as he let her go—“ this love— 
this yearning. And in life he only makes us j^earn that he 
may satisfy. He can not lead us to the end and disappoint the 
craving he himself set in us. No, no—could you—could I— 
do it? And he, the source of love, of justice—” 

Flaxman arrived a few days afterward. Edmondson had 
started for London the night before, leaving Elsmere better 
again, able to drive and even walk a little, and well looked 
after by a local doctor of ability. As Flaxman, tramping up 
behind his carriage, climbed the long hill to El Biar, he saw 
the whole marvelous place in a white light of beauty—the bay, 
the city, the mountains, olive-yard and orange-grove, drawn 
in pale tints on luminous air. Suddenly, at the entrance of a 
steep and narrow lane, he noticed a slight figure standing—a 
parasol against the sun. 

“ We thought you would like to be shown the short cut up 
the hill,” said Rose’s voice, strangely demure and shy. “ The 
man can drive round” 

A grip of the liand, a word to the driver, and they were 
alone in the high-walled lane, which was reall}^ the old road up 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


653 


the hill, before the French brought zigzags and civilization. 
She gave him news of Robert—better than he had expected. 
Under the influence of one of the natural reactions that wait 
on illness, the girl’s tone was cheerful, and Flaxman’s spirits 
rose. Tliey talked of the splendor of the day, the discomforts 
of the steamer, the picturesqueness of the landing—of an3'- 
thing and everything but the hidden something which was 
responsible for the dancing brightness in his eyes, the occ.a- 
sional swift veiling of her own. 

Then, at an angle of the lane, where a little spring ran cool 
and brown into a moss-grown trough, where the blue broke 
jo3"Ously through the gray cloud of olive-wood, where not a 
sight or sound was to be heard of all the busy life which hides 
and nestles along the hill, he stopped, his hands seizing hers. 

“ How long ? ” he said, flushing, his light overcoat falling 
back from his strong, well-made frame ; from August to 
February—how long ? ” 

No more ! It was most natural, nay, inevitable. For the 
moment death stood aside and love asserted itself. But this 
is no place to chronicle what it said. 

And he had hardly asked, and she had hardly yielded, be¬ 
fore the same misgiving, the same shrinking, seized on the 
lovers themselves. They sped up the hill, they crept into the 
house, far apart. It was agreed that neither of them should 
say a word. 

But, with that extraordinarily quick perception that some¬ 
times goes with such a state as his, Elsmere had guessed the 
position of things before he and Fiaxrnan had been half an 
hour together. He took a boyish pleasure in making his 
friend confess himself, and, when Flaxman left him, at once 
sent for Catherine and told her. 

Catherine, coming out afterward, met Flaxman in the little 
tiled hall. IIow she had aged and blanched ! She stood a 
moment opposite to him, in her plain long dress with its white 
collar and cuffs, her face working a little. 

“ We are so glad ! ” she said, but almost with a sob, “ God 
bless you ! ” 

And, wringing his hand, she passed away from him, hiding 
her eyes, but without a sound. When they met again she was 
quite self-contained and bright, talking much both with him 
and Rose about the future. 

And one little word of Rose’s must be recorded here, for 
those who have followed her through these four ^^ears. It was 
at night, when Robert, with smiles, had driven them out-of- 


654 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


doors to look at the moon over the bay, from the terrace just 
beyond the windows. They had been sitting on the balustrade 
talking of Elsmere. In this nearness to death, Rose had lost 
her mocking ways ; but she was shy and difficult, and Flax- 
man felt it all very strange, and did not venture to woo her 
much. 

When, all at once, he felt her hand steal trembling, a little 
wdiite suppliant, into his, and her face against his shoulder. 

“ You won’t—you won’t ever be angry with me for making 
you wait like that ? It was impertinent—it was like a child 
playing tricks ! ” 

Flaxman was deeply shocked by the change in Robert. He 
was terribly emaciated. They could only talk at rare inter¬ 
vals in the day, and it was clear that his nights were often one 
long struggle for breath. But his spirits were extraordinarily 
even, and his days occupied to a point Flaxman could hardl}^ 
have believed. He would creep downstairs at eleven, read his 
English letters (among them always some from Elgood Street), 
write his answers to them—those difficult scrawls are among 
the treasured archives of a society which is fast gathering to 
itself some of the best life in England—then often fall asleep 
with fatigue. After food there would come a short drive, or 
if the day was very warm, an hour or two of sitting outside, 
generally his best time for talking. He had a wheeled chair in 
which Flaxman would take him across to the convent garden— 
a dream of beaut3^ Overhead an orange canop}^—leaf and 
blossom and golden fruit all in simultaneous perfection; under¬ 
neath a revel of every imaginable flower—narcissus and anem¬ 
ones, geraniums and clematis ; and all about, hedges of 
monthly roses, dark red and pale alternately, making a rose- 
leaf carpet under their feet. Through the tree trunks shone 
the white, sun-warmed convent, and far beyond were glimpses 
of downward trending valleys edged by twinkling sea. 

Here, sensitive and receptive to his last hour, Elsmere drank 
in beauty and delight ; talking, too, whenever it was possible” 
to him, of all things in heaven and earth. Then when he 
came home he would have out his books and fall to some old 
critical problem—his worn and scored Greek Testament 
always beside him, the quick eye making its way through 
some new monograph or other, the parched lips opening eveiy 
now and then to call for Flaxman’s attention to some fresh 
light on an obscure point—only to relinquish the effort again 
and again with an unfailing patience. 

But though he Avould begin as ardently as ever, he could not 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


655 


keep his attention fixed to these things very long. Then it 
would be the turn of his favorite poets—Wordsworth, Tenny¬ 
son, Virgil. Virgil, perhaps, most frequently. Flaxman 
would read the ^neid aloud to him, Robert following the 
passages he loved best in a whisper, his hand resting the while 
in Catherine’s. And then Mary would be brought in, and he 
Avould lie watching her while she played. 

“ I have had a letter,” he said to Flaxman one afternoon, 
“ from a Broad Church clergyman in the Midlands, who im¬ 
agines me to be still militant in London, protesting against the 
‘ absurd and wasteful isolation ’ of the New Brotherhood. He 
asks me why instead of leaving the church I did not join the 
Church Reform Union, why I did not attempt to widen the 
church from within, and why we in Elgood Street are not now 
in organic connection with the new Broad Church settlement 
in East London. I believe I have written him rather a sharp 
letter ; I could not help it. It was borne in on me to tell him 
that it is all owing to him and his brethren that we are in the 
muddle we are in to-day. Miracle is to our time what the law 
was to early Christians. We micst make up our minds about 
it one way or the other. And if we decide to throw it over as 
Paul threw over the law, then we must fight as he did. There 
is no help in subterfuge, no help in anything but a perfect 
sincerity. We must come out of it. The ground must be 
cleared ; then may come the rebuilding. Religion itself, the 
peace of generations to come, is at stake. If we could wait 
indefinitely while the Church widened, well and good. But we 
have but the one life, the one chance of saying the word or 
playing the part assigned us.” 

On another occasion, in the convent garden, he broke out 
with : 

“ I often lie here, Flaxman, wondering at the way in which 
men become the slaves of some metaphysical word— person¬ 
ality^ or intelligence^ or what not ! What meaning can they 
have as applied to God f Herbert Spencer is quite right. We 
no sooner attempt to define what we mean by a Personal God 
that we lose ourselves in labyrinths of language and logic. 
But why attempt it at all ? I like that French saying : ^ Quand 
on me demayide ce que dest qne Dieu, Je Vignore; quand on 
me le demande pas, je le sais trls hienf' No, we can not 
realize him in words—we can only live in him, and die to 
him ! ’’ 

On another occasion he said, speaking to Catherine of the 
squire and of Meyrick’s account of his last year of life : 

How selfish one is always —when one least thinks it ! How 


656 


ROBERT ELSMERE. 


could I have forgotten him so completely as I did during all 
that New Brotherhood time ? Wliere, what is he now ? Ah ! 
if somewhere, somehow, one could—” 

He did not finish the sentence, but the painful yearning of 
his look finished it for him. 

But the days passed on, and the voice grew rarer, the 
strength feebler. By the beginning of March all coming 
downstairs was over. He was entirely confined to his room, 
almost to his bed. Then there came a horrible week, when no 
narcotics took effect, when every night was a wrestle for life, 
which it seemed must be the last. They had a good nurse, but 
Flaxnian and Catherine mostly shared the watching between 
them. 

One morning he had just dropped into a fevered sleep. 
Catherine was sitting by the window gazing out into a dawn- 
world of sun which reminded her of the summer sunrises at 
Petites Dalles. She looked the shadow of herself. Spiritually, 
too, she was the shadow of herself. Her life was no longer her 
own ; she lived in liini—in every look of those eyes—in every 
movement of that wasted frame. 

As she sat there, her Bible on her knee, her strained unsee¬ 
ing gaze resting on the garden and the sea, a sort of halluci¬ 
nation took possession of her. It seemed to her that she saw 
the form of the Son of Man passing over the misty slope in 
front of her, that the dim, majestic figure turned and beckoned. 
In her half dream-she fell on lier knees. “ Master ! ” she cried 
in agony, “I can not leave him ! Call me not! My life is 
iiere. I have no heart—it beats in his.” 

And the figure ])assed on, the beckoning hand dropping at 
its side. She followed it with a sort of anguish, but it seemed 
to her as though mind and body were alike incapable of 
moving—that she would not if she could. Then suddenly a 
sound from behind startled her. She turned, her trance shaken 
off in an instant, and saw Robert sitting up in bed. 

For a moment her lover, her husband of the early days was 
before her—as she ran to him. But he did not see her. 

An ecstasy of joy was on his face ; the whole man bent for¬ 
ward listening. 

The child'‘s cry !—thanh God! Oh! Meyrich — Cath¬ 
erine—ihanlc God!'‘^ 

And she knew that he stood again on the stairs at Murewell 
in that September night which gave them their first-born, and 
that he thanked God because her pain was over. 

An instant’s strained looking, and, sinking back into her 
arms, he gave two or three gasping breaths, and died. 


ROBERT ELSMKRE. 


G57 


Five days later Flaxmaii and Rose brought Catherine lioiiie. 
It was supposed that she would return to her mother at Bur- 
wood. Instead she settled down again in London, and not one 
of those whom Robert Elsmere had loved was forgotten by his 
widow. Every Sunday morning, witli her cliild beside her, 
she worshiped in the old ways ; every Sunday afternoon saw 
her black-veiled figure sitting motionless in a corner of the 
Elgood Street Hall. In the week she gave all her time and 
money to the various works of charity which he had started. 
But she held her peace. Many were grateful to lier ! some 
loved her ; none understood her. Slie lived for one lioj^e only; 
and the years passed all too slowly. 

The New 13 rotherhood still exists and grows. There are 
many who imagined that as it had been raised out of the earth 
by Elsmere’s genius, so it would sink with him. Not so ! He 
would have fought the struggle to victory with surpassing 
force, with a brilliancy and rapidity none after him could rival. 
But the struggle was not his. Ilis effort was but a fraction of 
the effort of the race. In that effort, and in the Divine force 
behind it, is our trust, as was his. 

“ Others, I doubt not, if not we. 

The issue of our toils shall see ; 

And (they forgotten and unknown) 

Young children gather as their own 
The harvest that the dead had sown.” 


THE END, 


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Boxing without a Mastero— With forty 
large illustrations, showing all the different posi* 
tions, blow.s, stops, and guards. By Nkd Donklcv, 
Professor of Boxing to the London Athletic Club. 

THE ART OF BEAUTIFYING AND 
Preserving the Hair: or, How to 

Make the Hair Crow.— 'I’his is the only 
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HAWTHORNE’S COMIC AND 
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of the most affecting, amusing, and spirited OiCr 
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SPEAKER AND ^READER ,— Preparim 

expressly and carefully for the use of young chil¬ 
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to delight and improve children of every age. 

HAWTHORNE’S TRAGIC RE* 

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^HAWTHORNE’S COMIC RECITER 

Filled with the liveliest, jolliest, laughter-provok. 
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Hawthorne’s Book of Ready- 
made Speeches ah subjects that can 
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Theatricals at Home: or. Plays 

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smoking the various kinds ot kieat, FTsli, ana 
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full of flavor, fruits, berries, and vegetables. To 
which is added coniplete directions lor making 
candies and choice confections. 

Fishing With Hopk and Line.—This 

book gives plain and tulT directions for catching 
all the different kinds of fish found in Americou 
waters; the proper season for fishing for them, 
and the bait, tackle, &c., to be used. 

Honest Abo’s Jokes.—A collection oJ 
autheutic jokes and squibs u. <tbiaUam l>ncolo. 







IHStRUMENTAL MUSIC HADE EAST. 



INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC 

SELF-UTSTHUCTOES. 


3Iuslc Without a Teacher. 

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Piano Withoot a Teacher. 


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The playing of this Household Instrument is made quite easy, A little daily ap¬ 
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Price 2a cent's. 

Violin Witliout a Teaclier. 

Every rule that could be learned from an Ole Bull, or Paganini can be gained from 
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German Accordeon Without a Teacher. 


All the sweet melodies of this Instrument can be easily rendered by an applica¬ 
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Banjo Witkont a Teacker. 

This lively Instrument can be learnt just as well from the plain rules of this book, 

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Cornet Witkont a Teacker. 

By close atteii^ion to these rules one can become as great a pro Icient as an Ar- 
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No plain, practical and perfect are the lessons given, that the 
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Heart Songs and Home Tunes 

Contains CO:WI*LETE I’lIUSIC OF NEARLY I«0 PIECEN, by such com¬ 
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15 cents. _ _ 

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address MURST & €0. 13:3 Nassau St. N. Y. 
















POPULAR FICTION' 

COMPRISING THE 

Recognized Masterpieces of the Great Novelists of the World. 

IN TWO VOLUM ES, 

TQiL'mmm oot § 

THE AUABIAX NIGHT^S EATERTAIAlflEAT, 

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Persians, Indians, Etc. Embellished with numerous engravings. 

THE EIFE A^H ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON 
CRUSOE, By Daniel De Foe. 

AFTER DARK IN BOSTON. A Working Girl’s Faith and 
Fate. By J. 0. Kaleb. 

EIUIAN DAEZEUU. By the author of “ Unclaimed.” 

THE CHIUDICEN OF THE ABBEY. A Tale. By 

Kegina Makia Koche. 

THE ROHANCE OF THE FOREST. Interspersed 
with some pieces of poetry. By Mbs. Radcliffe, Authoress of 
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GRIF ; or WORTH VERSUS WEALTH. An Aus¬ 
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TERIES OF THE FIINES. A Romance of California. 
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M. E. Beaddon. 

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Address, HURST & CO., Publishers, 122 Nassau St., N« Yd 







SIR edwardlTttoSlwer 

(Lord Lytton.) 


It is alaiost superfluous to say a word in praise of the prince of novelists. He 
holds an undivided sceptre over the mind of every intelligent reader. For skillful 
plots, fine discrimination of character, and powerful delineation of passion, he has 
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their manifold excellences. 


BIEXZI. This glorious Eepublican treads amid the broken pillars of the antique 
forum, and rouses his fallen countrymen. In this great book Bulwer admir¬ 
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PELHAM; or, THE ADVENTURES of a GENTLEMAN. Bulwer gives us an insight 
into the fashionable phase of London Society, and makes us acquainted with 
the real “higher classes.” 

PAUL CLIFFORD. It takes nothing from the interest of this great story to know 
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lUGENE ARAM. Stripped of all embellishment, this is the most woful tale that 
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from any eyes, "how’ver unused to the melting mood.” 

THE DISOWNED. No story was ever mere full of striking incidents, or of more 
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PILGRIMS OF THE RHINE. Every reviewer has eulogized this charming volume. 
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LAST DAYS OF POMPEII. It required the highest genius to fitly describe the 
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THE STUDENT. The thoughtful devotee of science is most poetically depicted. 
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DEVEREUX. Even Bulwer cannot hope to surpass this story. It seems perfec¬ 
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Address, HURST & CO., Pnblisliers, 122 Nai 






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TRUE POLITENESS,- A handbook 

ot etiquette for ladies. By an Auicrican lady. 

TRUE POLS TEN ESS.- Ahandbook 
of etiquette tor gentlemen. By an American 
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LADIES’WORKBOX COIVIPANION, 

. A handbook of knitting, netting, tatting, and 
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THE FIRESIDE COMPANION. 

A handbook of games for evening amusement. 

CHESSPLAYERS’ HANDBOOK. 

Containing a lull account ot the game ot chess, 
aad the best mode of playing it. 

HANDBOOK OF CONVERSATION 

AND TABLE-TALK. 

LADIES’ CROCHET MANUAL. 

A handbook ot crochet, useful and ornamental. 
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sdgings, caps, polkas, purses, doyleys, napkins, &c. 

THE MARRIACE LOOKING-CLASS 

A Handbook for newly married couples. 

Ko person should enter upon file duties and 
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HANDBOOK OF THE TOILET 

Containing Ample Direetions for adding to and Pre¬ 
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The materials of this little work have been 
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HANDBOOK OF WHIST.-Contalning 

the Laws of the (iame as laid down hy the best 
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In these pages the author has given, in a clear 
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THE LOVERS’ COMPANION. 

A Hauilhook of Courtship and .llarriage. 

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A Handbook for the Uallroera and evening parties. 

HOW TO SPEAK AND WRITE 

WITH ELEGANCE AND EASE. 

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examples are made extremely plain and clear In 
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HOWTO PRONOUNCE OSFFICULT 

^ WORDS. 

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hardest words or most difficult terms in the Eng¬ 
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absolute accuracy. 


SLANG AND VULGAR PHRASES 
AND FORMS. 

A collection of objectionable words, inaccurat* 
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quaint expressions, cant phrases, perversions and 
misapplicalions of terms, as used in the various 
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THE FORTUNE-TELLER AND 
DREAM-BOOK. 

OE, THE FUTUKE UNFOLDED 
Containing plain, correct, and certain rules fof 
foretelling what is going to happen. 'S>s the cele¬ 
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HOWTO LIVE A HUNDRED YEARS 

A practical and reliable guide to health and 
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good, and a good memory still better. 

TERENCE TIERNEY, ADMIRAL. 

This work, by the celebrated Banim, has re* 
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as the best delineation of Irish character, in its 
brighter phases, ever published. 

THE CABIN-BOY: A Tale of the 
Wide Ocean. ByCapt. L. G Kinostoh. 
Since the advent of “ Kobinson Crusoe,” we wik 
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the wide ocean, by n well-known and popular an 
thor. ft is charming, fresh, and vigorous, and is 
written as only un old salt could write. 

THE PEEP-O’-DAY BOYS; or,Wild 
Life on the Mountains. ByM. Banui. 

CAPTAIN DOE, THE MOUNTAIN 
CHIEF. By John Banim. 

This is a novel which, foe entrancing interest, 
has never been sury.nssed. The marvelous adven¬ 
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CLERK BARTOi^’S CRIME; or,the 
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NewYork Life.High <&. Low. By Steele Penn.^ 

THE SHOWMAN’S GUIDE. 

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things in nnoieiit nnd modern mnelc, and 
is the textbook for all showmen. 

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Ilotelo, Tliontc-!*(*, a:m other objects of interest 
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GUIDE MAP OF NEWYORK CITY, 

Cuuvenlently foldeil for Une pocket. 









MERICAH STAEBARD LIBRARY. 


This series includes the very cream of English literatnre. The 
books comprise the best standard works in Poetry's History^ 
Fiction, and Biograpliy. Each volume is made up in the popular 
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volumes contain from 300 to 400 pages, and are, without doubt, the 
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public. Price One Dollar Each. 

Chaucer’s Poetical Works 


A very complete edition of tbe works of the 
“Father of English poetry.” 

Spenser’s Poetical Works. 

A new edition, with Glossary. 

Dryden’s Poetical Works. 

The complete works of John Dryden. 

Byron’s Poetical Works. 

Lord Byron’s Complete Works. Eeprinted from 
the original edition. 

Shelley’s Poetical Works. 

Eeprinted from the early editions. 

Keats’s Poetical Works. 

The complete works of Joun Keats. Eeprinte<l 
from the early editions. 

Hood’s Poetical Works. 

Tom Hood will ever remain a favorite. This 
volume contains the whole of his poems. 

Heber’s Poetical Works. 

A new edition of the works of this eminent 
Christian poet. 

Owen Meredith’s Poetical 
Works, 

Complete, from the best English edition. 

Jean Ingelow’s Poetical 
Works. 

A very fine edition of the works of this popujar 
poetess. 

George Eliot’s Poems. 

Tb.e Poems of George Eliot. From 
the latest London edition. 

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the Floss,” “Adam Bede,” and other wonderful 
novels; but a perusal of these poems will convince 
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For brilliant imagery, vividness of description, ac¬ 
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Shakspeare’s Complete 
Works.— A new and portable 

edition of Shakspearc’s works. 


The Last Days of Pompeii, 

By Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Bart 

A very nept edition of this powerful historiCM 
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Paul and Virginia, Rasse ; 
las, Vicar of Wakefield, 

Who would be without this trio of classic genvj 
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Dickens’s Child’s History 
of England. 

The Child’s History of England. By Charles 
Dickens. A new edition for the use of Schooli 
Illustrated. 

, Ivanhoe. By SIfWalter Scott 

From the last revised edition, containing the at,. 
' thor’s final corrections, notes, &.c. 

History of Don Quixote €ie, 
la Mancha. 

From the Spanish of Cervantes. Illustrated Uy 
Dore. 

Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 

By Thomas Hughes. We anticipate a largt 
for this celebrated work. 

Grimm’S Popular Tales, 

A new translation by this popular German author. 

Willy Reilly and his Dear 
Colleen Bawn. 

A handsome edition of this charming story. 

Vanity Fair. By w.m.Thackerat. 

By many considered the author’s masterpiece. 

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without abridgment. 

The Complete Angler. By 

IzAAK Walton and Charles Cotton. 
A new illustrated edition. With Notes, 
by G. C. Davies. 

David Copperfield. 

By Charles Dickens. Illustrated. 

The Last of the Mohicans. 

A Narrative of 1757. By J. Fennimorh 
Cooper. 


Herbert’s Complete Works 

The works of George Herbert in prose and 

verse. 


Address HURST & CO. 13S Nassau St. N.Y 








POPULAR DICTIONARY 


OONTAININO 

EVERY USEEUL WORD 

To be found in the English Language, with its 
TRUE MEANING, DERIVATION, SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

ALSO. A VAST AMOUNT OF 

ABSOLUTEIiY NECESSARY INFORMATION 

UPON 

ikienct. Mythology, Biographv, American History, Constitutions, Laws, Land Titles^ 
Cities, Colleges, Army and Navy, Rate of Mortality, Growth of Cities, 
Insolvent and Assignment Laws, Debts, Rates of Interest, 
and other Useful Knowledge, being a 

PERFECT LIBRARY OF REFERENCE IN ONE HANDY VOLUME. 


The pnblishers of the A M E RIC A N POPULAR DICTION ARY claim for it the sop- 

art'of the public, for the following among many other important reasons 

It contains EVERY WORD OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE that enters into speech or writing. 

THE SPELLING of each word is precisely that given by the best authorities. 

THE DEFINITIONS are compiled from a majority of the best writers ofth' English language. 

THE PRONUNCIATION of every word is that settled upon by the ablest masters of this mostlm* 
portant branch of Grammar. 

In addition to the perfections-of this work as a Dictionary,itcontains a vast amountx>f information 
npen MANY KINDS OF USEFUL KNOWLEDGE not to be found in any similar work; but all 
ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to every one who wishes to be acquainted with the leading subjects of con¬ 
versation and composition. 

By reference to the annexed TABLE OF CONTENTS it will be found that the book'is really a oou- 
else and portable Cyclopedia of very useful and valuable information. From it a speaker or writer can 
glean an amount of real knowledge impossible to find elsewhere collected hi one book. 

THE AMERICAN POPULAR DICTlONARYis printed from new type, with extra clear and legibln 
face. It is^bound very strongly and neatly. 


TABI.K OK CONTEXTS 


1. A Complete Dictionary of the Eng. Language. 

2. A Complete List of Scripture Proper Names, 

including Apocrypha, and their pronuncia¬ 
tion. 

5. American Geographical Names, with their der¬ 

ivation, signification, and their pronuncia¬ 
tion. 

4. Nicknames of the States and Cities of the U. S. 

6. The Discovery and Discoverers of America. 

6 . The Aborigines of North America, showing 

their tribes, location and number. 

7. Early Settlers and Settlements of the United 

States—nationality, location, dale, &c. 

8. Troops of the American Revolution, showing 

the number each State furnished. 

8. R.-ittles and Losses of the Revolution. 

10. The Declar.allon of Independence. 

11. The Signers of the DecLaration of Independ¬ 

ence. 

12. The Presidents of the Continental Congress 

13. Constitution of the United States- 

14. History of the American Fla;,. 

15. Area and Population of the United States. 

16. Population of all Cities and Towns in the C. 

8. having a population of over 10,000. 

17. Growth of American Cities having a popula¬ 

tion of 50,000 and upward. 

18. Public Debt of the United St.atcs,1791 to 1879, 

19. The Amount of Paper Mo'sey in the United 

States, of each denomination. 

20. Analysis of the Publie Debt of the United 

States. 

21. United States Public Lands—where they lie, 
2*1. The United States Public Land System. 

83. F>ee Homesteads on the Public Lands, or how 
to secure a homestead. 

24. Homestead and Eiomption Laws of the U. S. 

25. The Canals of the United States—their length, 

connecting points, number of locks, cost,Ac. 
ICMDgly houad ia oletb, gilt hock. 


26. The Municipal Debts of the United States. 

27. Theological Seminaries in the United Statee, 

denominations, professors, students, in each. 

28. Occupations of the People of the U. 8, 

29. Army of the United States, with rates of pay. 

80. Navy of the Uiti'ied States, with rates of pay. 

81. Navy-yards of the United Stales. 

82. Number of Men raised by each State for th« 

suppression of the Rebellion. 

33. Churches in the United States, with statistiea. 

34. Price of commodities for Ihepast fifty year*. 

85. Statutes of Limitations of the various State*. 

86. Interest Laws in the United States. 

87. Insolvent and Assignment Laws oi the differ. 

ent States. 

88. Newspapers and Periodicals in theU. 8. 

39. Heads of the prinripal nations of the world. 

40. The Carlisle Tables, showing how many per¬ 

sons out of 10,000 will die annually. 

41. The Railroads of the World—length, cost, &c. 

42. Commerce, Debts, fee., of the principal nations 

43. National Debts of the various countries. 

44. The Merchant Shipping of the world. 

45. The Dominion of Cunad!^ revenue, trade, Ac. 

46. The Armies of the world,with full particulars 

47. The Navies of the world—numbers, cost, Ac. 

48. Foreign Gold and Silver Coins—value, Ac. 

49. Weights and Measures ofthe United States. 

50. General Councils of the Roman Cathulis 

Church. 

61. Chronological History of the United State*. 

52. List of Mythological and Classical Names. 

63. Interest Tables, at 4, 6, 6, 7, 8 and 10 per et. 

64. Examples of the Common Error* in Speaking 

and Writing, with Corrcetlons. 

55. A Guide to the Pronunciation of Hard Word*, 
in the Ensrlish and other languages. 

66. A List of Objectionable Words and Phrase*, 
and Inaccurate Expression*. 

Sent'to any address on receipt of priee. 


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ST ANDARD LITERATU RE. 

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historical and critical literature. Most of these works have hitherto been unac- 
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THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. 

AK INQMmY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE 'WEAETH 
OF NATIONS. By Adam Smith, LL.I)., P.R.S. This volume is a careful reprint 
of the three-volume edition. / 

ADAM SMITH’S ESSAYS. 

ESSAYS, PHELOSOPmCAE AND EITERARY; including the "Theory 
of Moral Sentiments,” ‘‘The Formation of Languages,” ‘‘Astronomical Inquiries,” 
‘‘Ancient Physics,” ‘‘Ancient Lome and Metaphysics,” ‘‘The Imitative Arts—Music, 
Lancing, Poetry,” ‘‘The External Senses,” ‘‘EnglI:^h and Italian Verses,” &e. By 
Adam Smith, LL.D., F.R.S. 

MCCULLOCH’S POLITICAL ECONOMY. 

THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, with a sketch of the 
Rise and Progress of the Science. By J. R. McCdlloch. With an Essay on In- 
terest, and the Value of Money. By John Locke. 

MONTAIGNE’S ESSAYS. 

THE ESSAYS OF MICHAEL SEIGNEUR DE MONTAIGNE, with 
ITotes and Quotations, and an Account of the Author’s Life, translated into English 
^y Charles Colton, Esq. 

BOLINOBROKE ON THE STUDY AND USE OF HISTORY. 

LETTERS ON THE STUDY AND USE OF HISTORY; ‘‘On Exile," 
“The Spirit of Patriotism,” “The Idea of a Patriot King,” “The State of Parties in 
1744.” By ELenby St. John, Lord Viscount BoRngbroke. 

HUME’S ESSAYS. 

ESSAYS,—LITERARY, MORAL, AND POLITICAL. By Lavid Hums 
(the historian). , 

SIDNEY SMITH’S ESSAYS. 

ESSAYS,—SOCIAL AND POLITICAL. By Rev. Sidney Smiti^ 

MILMAN’S HISTORY OF THE JEWS. 

HISTORY OF THE JEWS. B y H. H. Milman, D.D., late Lean of St. Paul’s. 

HALLAM’S EUROPF. 

\TEW OF THE STATE OF EUROPE DURING THE IVUDDLE AGES. 
By Henry Hallam, LL.L., F.R.A.S. 

LOCKE ON THE HUMAN UNDERSTANDING. 

AN ESSAY CONCERNING THE HUM<4_l^ UNDERSTANDING. By 
John Locke. With the Notes and Illustrations of the author, and an Analysis of 
his Doctrine of Ideas. Also, Questions on Locke’s Essay, for the use of students. i 

D’AUBIGNE’S HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION, 

THE HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION OF THE SIXTEENTH 
CENTURY, from its commencement to the days of Cal-vin. By J. H. Merle 
D’AUBiaNi3, L.D, Translated from the author’s late French edition. 

MILTON’S EARLY BRITAIN, &c, 

BRITAIN UNDER TROJAN, ROMAN, AND SAXON RULE. By John 

Milton. -ENGLAND UNDER RICHARD III. By Sir Thomas More. 

THE REIGN OF HENRY VII. By Lord Bacon. Three books hound in one 
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ESSAYS ON BEAUTY AND TASTE. 

ESSAY ON BEAUTY. By Francis [Lord] Jeffrey. -ESSAY ON 

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Tlie Prose Writers of Am¬ 
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and interesting extracts from the writ¬ 
ings of leading American authors. By 
George B. Cheeveb. 

This book is an absolute necessity to any one 
who wishes to be acquainted with the excellences 
as well as the peculiarities of our great prose 
writers and orators. Here will be found specimens 
of some of the most exquisitely fine, grand, fiery, 
simple, ornate, and effective writing and oratory 
that the English language contains. It is full of 
“thoughts tliat breathe and words that burn.” 
Any one that has carefully read this volume will 
be able to fully appreciate the God-given genius 
of those authors and orators who have helped to 
crush vice, exalt patriotism, and wreathe the pure 
brows of virtue with amaranthine flowers. 

The Poets of America. By 

George B. Cheever. 

This work is one much needed. It contains all 
♦he most truly beautiful short pieces of American 
poetry,—the clear wheat winnowed of all chaff. 
There are numerous pieces which appeared in va¬ 
rious Kterary papers anonymously, and which have 
since become famous, and which it is impossible 
to find except in these pages. This book is, in 
truth, the most complete compendium of the best 
poems of our best poets that has yet been made. 
It must be remembered, too, that the majority of 
articles in this book were selected by the authors, 
Bs,80 to speak,the choicest arrows in their quivers. 

Tbe British Female Poets. 

With biographical and critical notices. 
By George W. Bethune. 

This work contains the finest specimens of the 
writings of no less than sixty of the best Female 
Poets of Great Britain. There are hundreds of 
pieces, most of them real “ gems of purest ray se¬ 
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from Anne Boleyn to Fanny Kemble. 

Biographical Sketches of 
Eminent People who figured 

during the earlier and later periods of 
the Present Century, including Literary, 
Scientific, Professional, Social, Political, 
and Royal Personages, By Harriet 
Martineau. 

These sketches are not mere dry details of dates 
of birth, marriage, and death, but searclung anal¬ 
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characters by one of the ablest women that ever 
lived. 

Scott’s Lives of Novelists 
and Dramatists. “Lives of 

Eminent Novelists and Dramatists.” 
By Sir Walter Scott, New edition, 
revised, with additional notes. 

The Book of Authors. —A 

Collection of Criticisms,Mots,Personal 
Descriptions, «S5C., wholly refcn-ing to 
English men of letters in every age of 
English literature. 


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England. “The Constitutional 

History of England from the time of 
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tory of England,” by J. L. De Lolme. 

History of the Saracens. 

“The Saracens: Their History, and the 
Rise and Fall of their Empire.” By 
Edward Gibbon and Simon Ockley. 

Scott’s Essays on Chivalry, 

Romance, and the Drama. By Sir 

Walter Scott. 

The Koran. Commonly called 
“The Alkoran of Mohammed.” Trans¬ 
lated into English from the original 
Arabic. With Explanatory Notes 
taken from the most approved com¬ 
mentators. To which is added a pro- 
liminary discourse by George Sale. 

Representative Actors. A 

Collection of Criticisms, Anecdotes, 
Personal Descriptions, &c., referring 
to many celebrated British Actors, 
from the sixteenth to the present cen¬ 
tury. WTth Notes, Memoirs, and a 
Short Account of English Acting. By 
W. Clark Russell. 
Munchausen. “The Travels 
and Surprising Adventures of Baron 
Munchausen. 

Baron Munchausen can “take the cake ” as the 
champion liar of the ages. He tells amusing but 
incredible fibs with such minute details and grav¬ 
ity that he might “deceive the very elect.” Grave 
professors as well as gay scholars always have thii 
book in a sly dark corner. If we were to tell how 
many million copies have been sold we would be 
accused of “ Munchausening.” 

The Adventures of Gil Bias. 

Translated from the French of Lb 

Sage by Smollet. 

Pepy’s Diary, “The Diary of 

Samuel Pepys, Esq., F.R.S., from 1659 
to 1669, with Memoir. Edited by Lord 
Bbaybrooke. 

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of John Evelyn, Esq., F.R.S.jfrom 1641 
to 1705-6, with Memoir. Edited by 
William Bray. 

Half Hours with the Best 
Authors. Including Biograph¬ 
ical and Critical Notices by Charles 
Knight. Hlustrated. 

A Century of Anecdotes, 

from 1760 to 1860. By John Times, 
P.o. A. 


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Poems of Greene, Marlowe, 

and Jonson. ‘‘The Poems of 
Robert Greene, Christopher Mar¬ 
lowe, and Ben Jonson. Edited, wdth 
Critical and Historical Notes and Sep¬ 
arate Memoirs of the three writers. 
By Robert Bell. 

This triumvirate of literary giants is only over- 
topTCd in part by the “ cloud-capped ” genius of 
ShaKspere. Their poems, though differing in de¬ 
gree, are all marked by a wonderful affluence of 
imagination, vivified by a great dramatic power of 
characterization, and rich, sonorous, and, at times, 
delicate expression. 

Tasso’s Poems. The “Jeru¬ 
salem Delivered” of Torquato Tasso, 
translated into English Spencerian 
verse by J. H. Wiffen. 

The fiery splendor of Torquato Tasso’s diction 
has covered with undying luster the gallant deeds 
of those knights who “ ’gainst the infidels displayed 
the blessed cross, and won the holy land.” Nor is 
the “Jerusalem Delivered” wanting in passages 
of tender love-making,— heart-entrancing and pa¬ 
thetic. It is hard to say which is first of the Mo¬ 
rions galaxy of Tasso, Petrarch, and Dante. 

Petrarcli’s Poems. The Son¬ 
nets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of 
fETRARCH. First completely trans- 
ihted into English verse by various 
hands. With Life of Petrarch. 

Vhile the fair land of Italy was deluged with 
frgternal blood, Petrarch, the sweetest poet that 
ever attuned the lyre to love, produced the im¬ 
mortal “ Sonnets ” that have outlived all the fret 
and fury of sanguinary fray.s. No lovers—be they 
of either sex—know anything of what can be said 
and sung of “the old, old story” of “two souls with 
but a single thouglit, two hearts that beat as one,” 
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Twenty Thousand Leases 
under the Sea; or, the Mar¬ 
velous and Exciting Adventures of 
Pierre Aronna, Conseil his servant, and 
Ned Land, a Canadian harpooner. By 
Jules Verne. 

Five Weeks in a Balloon; or 

Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by 
three Englishmen. By Jules Verne. 

The Mysterious Island. 

Containing ‘ ‘Dropped from the Clouds, ” 
‘ Abandoned,” and “The Secret of the 
Island.” By Jules Verne. 

The Tour of the World in 
Eighty Days. By Jules Verne. 

The Fur Country; or, Seventy- 

Degrees North Latitude. By J. Verne. 

Since the time of the elder Dumas, Prance has 

S roduced no such fecund or original a genius as 
ules Verne. He has turned science into a veri¬ 
table fairy-land, and extracted such romance from 
hard facts as It would tax the ingenuity of any 
ordinary mortal even to conceive possible. The 
“Tour of the World” has become lamiliar to the 
public on the stage as well as in type. No less 
thrilling or rich in interest are his otlier famous 
and widely popular works. 

Self-Help. With Illustrations 

of Cliaracter and Conduct. By Samuel 
Smiles. 

All young people who desire to vanquish “ those 
twin jailers of the immortal soul, low birth and 
misfortune,” should read and study this interest¬ 
ing book. All the moral maxims of Franklin are 
here incarnated in living being. We see the strug¬ 
gles and the triumphs of genius in. the lives of its 
noblest exemplars. 


Virgil’s Poems. Translated into 

English by John Dryden. 

The justly high estimation in wliich Virgil is 
held, is well shown by the fact that Dryden, one 
of England’s grandest poets, was glad to “play 
second lute ” to him. Unlike most translations it 
loses nothing of the power and beauty of the great 
originaL 

Miss Mulocli’s Poems. “The 

Poems of Dinah Maria Muloch (IMrs 
Craik), author of ‘John Halifax, Gen¬ 
tleman,’ ” &c. 

“John Halifax, Gentleman,” is one of the best 
novels ever written; but it is quite certain that 
the author’s lasting fame will rather rest upon the 
great merits of her poems. They have every mark 
of great and original powers; and they all possess 
in an eminent degree the qualities of force, en¬ 
ergy, and dignity, united with matchless grace and 
delicacy of poetic expression. 

Tlie Houseliold Book of Wit 

B/Ud. Hnmor. Comprising many 
of the Wittiest Poems and Funniest 
Anecdotes extant, by the most cele¬ 
brated authors. Illustrated. 


Famous Men. ByH. A. Page, 

author of “Life of DeQuincey,” &c. 

This is already a deservedly “famous” book. 
Its style is so taking that it is very charming read¬ 
ing for both young and old, apart from the fat-t 
that it gives us reliable biograpnies of world-noted 
missionaries, philanthropists, editors, merchants, 
soldiers, and scientists,— of men who have been 
an honor to our race. 

Famous Boys, and How They 

Became Great JMen. 

Here is a book that every parent should place 
in his boy’s hand. Once there, it will never go 
unread. It is written with frank plainness,— and 
every trait and act brought out,without exaggera¬ 
tion or false coloring. It has many fine engrav¬ 
ings, but its best illustrations are the word-pictun^s 
of over twenty lads who in after life became Icmlcrs 
of thought and action. 

Sandford and Merton. By 

Thomas Day. Hlustrated. 

Custom can not .stale the infinite variety of good 
points in this admirable book. It pleased our 
grandparents and our parents, and is more read 
and admired to-day than ever. It is like a well of 
pure and wholesome water—a bencfactiom to all 
who drink of it. 


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Teimyson’s PoeticalWorks 

Tlie Complete Works of Alfeed Ten¬ 
nyson. Illustrated- 

The matchless lays of England’s laureate grow 
in deserved popularity every hour. Tennyson is 
in poetry what Mendelssohn is in music,— lie cap¬ 
tivates and entrances by the mere melody of ar¬ 
rangement ; but when character, sentiment, and 
story are added, he is simply unsurpassable. 

Scott’s Poetical Works. 

The Poetical Works of Sir Walter 
Scott. With Memoir. 

Sir Walter’s metrical romances rank him with 
the noblest of authors. “Marmion,” “The Lady 
of the Lake,” “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” 
and many others, will be read with infinite zest 
while, man has a Iniart to throb at deeds of daring, 
and woman a tear to shed for hapless lovers, 

Byron’s Poetical Works. 

The Complete Poetical Works of Lord 
Byron. 

The poet who was refused a tomb in Westmin¬ 
ster Abbey has a renown only limited by human 
intelligence. He roams from the deepest tra^dy 
in “Cliilde Harold ” to the lightest humor in “Don 
Juan”; and in every mood and style h« stands uu- 
paragoned. 

Arnold’s Poems. The Poems 

of Edwin Arnold. Containing “The 
Light of Asia,” “The Indian Song of 
Songs,” “Pearls of the Faith, or Islam’s 
Rosary,” and other poems and transla¬ 
tions. 

This beautiful volume of the poetical works of 
Edwin Arnold includes “The Liglit of Asia,” 
“The Indian Song of Songs,” and “The Thousand 
Sacred Names of Allah,” e.Kplainiiig and illustrat¬ 
ing the three dominant religions of Asia,— com¬ 
prising nearly half the descendants of Adam. 
'J'hese great poems combine the might of Milt«n 
with the melody of Moore. 

Heine’s Poems. “The Poems 

and Ballads of Heinrich Heine.” 
Translated by Emma Lazarus. With 
biographical sketch. 

No oue with the slightest pretence to taste can 
afford to be without this book. Heink lind all 
Carlyle’s bitter hatred of shams; but he wielded 
a keen Damascus blade instead of a Thor’s batkle- 
wxe. This translator fully appreciates and renders 
the polished irony and terrible sarcasm of this 
greet poet and most unhappy man. 

Kingsley’s Poems, includinpj 

“The Saint’s Tragedy,” “Andromeda,” 
Songs, Ballads, &c. By Rev. Charles 
Kingsley. 

The Rev. Charles Kingsley has an enviable name 
as an author of novels, essays, lectures, and fairy 
tales,—as witness “ Hypatia,’’ “ Glaucus,” “ Water 
Babies,” “ Town Geology,” fee. The great variety 
of liis prose subjects and their admiralne treatment 
explains the. worth and beauty of his poetry,—now 
first printed in this elegant style. 

^Legendary Ballads of Eng¬ 
land and Scotland. Com- 


Tlie Poems of Victor Hugo^ 

With Memoir. 

The poetic works of this “old man eloquent** 
exceed in quantity and excel in quality those of 
any of his gifted countrymen. This volume con¬ 
tains poems upon almost every subject of human 
interest, embracing Love, Romance, Childhood, 
War, Freedom, Exile, and hundreds of other 
themes; and every theme he touches he vivifies 
and ennobles by the grandeur and beaut / of his 
rhythm and language. 

Johnson’s Lives of the Eng¬ 
lish Poets. “Lives of tlie 

Most Eminent English Poets. With 
Critical Obsei’\’ations on their works. 
To which are added the “Preface to 
Shakspeare,” and the Review of “The 
Origin of Evil.” By Samuel Johnson, 
LL.D. With a sketch of the author’s 
life, by Sir Walter Scott. New 
edition, with a complete ind«x. 

Homer’s Iliad. Translated by 

Alexander Pope. 

The feats of Achilles and Hector, the arts of the 
beauteous Helen, the prophetic ravings of Cassan¬ 
dra, the death of Priam, and the fall of Troy, are 
but a few of the grand and pathetic episodes that, 
in this poem, like stars in the heavens, glitter m 
imperishable glory forever. 

Homer’S Odyssey. Translated 

by Alexander Pope. 

Though the Iliad is “one pure and perfect 
chrysolite,” the Odyssey is its worthy companion. 
It so absorbingly carries us along with Ulysses and 
his companions in their devious and wonderful ad¬ 
ventures in trying to regain their homes after the 
fall of the doomed Trojan city. Pope s clear-cut 
crystal diction finely renders the stirring narrative. 

Book of Frencli Songs. 

Translated by John OxENFORD. With 
copious notes, and with the Songs also 
in the original. To which is added 
specimens of the earlypoetry of France 
from the time of the Troubadours and 
Trouveres to the reign of Henry^Quatre. 
By Louisa Stuart Costello. Ill«st. 

Spanisli Ballads, and Cliron- 
icle of tlie Cid. “Spanish 
Ballads.” Translated by J. G. Lock¬ 
hart, LL.D. “The Chronicle of the 
Cid.” Translated by Robert Southey. 

Every-day Book of Modern 
Literature. A series of short 

readings from the best authors. Com¬ 
piled and edited by Geo.H.Townsend. 

Lockkart’s Life of Scott. 

“Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter 
Scott.” By J. G. Lockhart. 


Hudibras. By Samuel Butler. 

With Notes and Preface by Zachary 
piled and edited by S. Roberts. Grey, LL.D. 

AddresTHimiTr&'coriiaslVassauStrNrr. 








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